Rhizome is a New York-based nonprofit arts organization with a long history of engagement with digital art and culture trendsetters. The first NFT was minted at a festival in 2014. Participants include Miranda July and Aaron Swartz.
This weekend, the organization partnered with the New Museum to host 7×7’s 14th annual festival. The festival pairs seven artists and seven technicians and asks them to rapidly collaborate on new works of art.
The 2024 festival marks the return of the festival after several years of hiatus. And while the organization has long been committed to the potential of artificial intelligence as an artistic medium, the advent of fast and easily accessible generative AI tools means AI will be everywhere. Why would you want to find an AI in a gallery when you can’t even escape it in Amazon’s product reviews section?
“Rather than immediately thinking about whether AI is good or bad, whether it will replace our jobs, it is actually important that we take a step back and take a broader approach to AI. It feels like a great time,” said Xinlan Yuan, co-curator of this year’s 7×7 event.
Let’s go back to my friend Echo. Mr. Leeson and Mr. Kuida began the project with a story suggested by Mr. Leeson. In other words, her grandmother, trying to save humanity from its own discriminatory nature, flies into space with a set of human fetuses in search of a fresh start. What about her lonely companion? artificial intelligence.
“There aren’t enough grandmas in movies,” Leeson quipped, eliciting the only spontaneous applause of the day.
Leeson is a digital and performance artist whose work seems more innovative with each passing year. In her 2002 film Teknolust, Tilda Swinton plays a scientist who runs an online chat service and lives off semen (ethically and safely harvested from one-night stands). She stars as three self-replicating automatons. Although the film flopped at Sundance, the chat service Agent Her Ruby’s EDream portal lives on thanks to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The two showed a clip of “Teknolust” while introducing 7×7’s work. The story ended with Swinton admonishing the automatons, “Remember, don’t let anyone know you’re real.”
Mr. Kuida suggested that an old woman and an AI fall in love.
Kuida’s day job is as CEO of Replika, an AI companion bot company. (Echo was custom built as a one-time Replika.) Replika is one of the most popular AI-powered chatbots and most commonly used for romantic relationships. Kuida told the Post. The company has come under intense scrutiny for affecting users’ intimate details and mental health, especially when updates change the bot’s personality.Several Users feel abandoned.
Kuida appeared to talk about this on stage. Michael Connor, Rhizome’s co-executive director, asked about the confusion the Replika update has caused for users. Kuida said users can now opt out of updates that improve the model. Some users say they are satisfied with what the company considers a less intelligent version of AI.
“Do you want your users, whether AI or human, to be hurt or experience love?” or [do] Do you step aside? Kuida told the Post. “I think in our case, as long as we can say the answer is simple, as long as it’s safe and helps people feel better, we’ll stand aside.”
Connor and Ewan, the curators of this year’s festival, hope to broaden the scope of their work by including creators working outside of traditional museum spaces. This year’s participants include Boston Dynamics’ Director of Human-Robot Interaction (your algorithms no doubt helped their robots do backflips and walk down runways); They included comedian Ana Fabrega (“Los Espoquies”) and musician and comedian Reggie Watts. .
The atmosphere is casual, the venue (the underground auditorium of the Neues Museum) is intimate, with actual attendance of approximately 170 people, and the live stream on the Neues Museum’s YouTube page averaging approximately 80 active viewers during the event. was. As I was checking in, Fabrega was in line ahead of me and was getting a wristband like everyone else.
Fabrega was paired with Cristóbal Valenzuela, CEO of Runway, a generative AI video company. She brought deadpan humor to the stage from the get-go, introducing herself through a series of AI-generated film and TV projects. She told the audience that she and Valenzuela clashed at the beginning of their collaboration over different notions of what AI should or should be asked to do, and did not fully reconcile until they met in person.
“I’ve been trying to make my jokes into complete sentences,” Fabrega said of his interactions with the AI. She realized that she needed to treat it as a tool rather than a collaborator. I’m not asking whether popular video editing software Adobe Premiere makes good movies, Fabrega said. We asked the editor and director behind it.
The presentations performed even better as the days went on. After a break, Boston Dynamics’ robot dog took to the stage with dancers to perform and host a performance created by artist Miriam Shimun.
Dancers and robots marched, circling each other and swinging matching ropes. Forget about walking in fashion shows, as similar robots did in the fashion line “Coperni” last spring. Robots never look smarter than when they have to be told repeatedly to drop a toy, like a little puppy.
“Do it. Do it. Do it, Spot,” human dancer Mol Mendel admonished.
So, can bringing AI into our artistic endeavors be the answer to our existential questions about the role of AI in society?
“You can think about what people should do with AI, but when you actually interact with it, it’s going to be very different from what you expect,” Kuida says.
