Event 3: Media Art Nexus

A selfie of me at the event!

On May 22, 2018, I attended a guest lecture from Ina Conradi & Mark Chavez who are both part of the Media Art Nexus in Singapore.

One of Ina's most prominent works

Ina Conradi spoke first. She first talked about her early works as a student at UCLA in the late 80s as well as her work in Japan in the early 90s. She then talks about the work she has done at the NTU Singapore School of Art, Design, and Media. Much of her work regards a concept called S3D Pictorial Spaces Expanded Cinema. She uses computer graphics and art to create beautiful masterpieces. During her times there, she created the Elysian Fields which was a short film nominated for an Oscar. She then talks about current projects such as the Media Wall, The Cube Out as well as future projects such as Elman 2018.

A recent project of Mark Sanchez

Next, Mark Chavez spoke. He first began with his very early works such as the Stone Mountain animation and his MFA thesis project which was used in the 1984 summer Olympics. He then went into his project, Clone 3-D which was an AI that would respond and react using a realistic avatar of a woman to human input. Next, he talked about various topics regarding human emotion and thought processes such as Pareidolia, Artistic Abstraction, the circumplex model of affect. He then talks about the various projects he's been working on that has been using 3-D characters and modeling to produce various human emotions in those watching these characters and models.

At the end of each of their lectures, they talked about using Artificial Intelligence and their belief that it could help further their work. This interested me the most. In the week 3 lecture, Professor Vensa talked about how the creation and formation of robots was an art (Vensa). However, robots creating art was a whole different matter.

Art created by AI. It is nearly impossible to differentiate from a human's (Elgammal)

Last year, researchers at the Rutgers' Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory discovered that given art between the 15th and 20th century, programs could generate artwork that was impossible to differentiate with a human's (Elgammal). This prompts the question: Is art created by AI really art? In the pictures above, the art was created as a mimic of various famous artists. Unlike the art created by humans, there is no emotion or story behind the art. For the makers of these paintings, the robots, it is just merely pixels of colors that are arranged similarly to old pieces of art that they made in seconds (Pogue).

Professor Vensa also talked about the Turing test, a robotic test that could determine whether a machine can exhibit behavior identical to that of a human being (Vensa). Researchers at MIT believe that art can be used as a sort of Turing test for robots (MIT technology review). As I mentioned before, the paintings that that AI has made is merely derivative from old works. These researchers at MIT believe that if an AI can create a completely unique art form that has never been seen before that is that not explicitly derived from an older form, it will have past the test as it would behave like a human art prodigy would. This is an extremely unique take on the Turing Test and will be an interesting development for the upcoming future.

As both Ina Conradi & Mark Chavez have said, they will be looking to use AI to create new art. But what if they are no longer needed? What if robots, due to their superior computing power, merely replace humans as the source of new art and imagination? The next few years will be critical for the relationship between mankind and machinekind.

Sources:

Vesna, Victoria. “Robotics Pt 2.” Desma 9.

Vesna, Victoria. “Robotics Pt 3.” Desma 9.

Elgammal, Ahmed. “Generating ‘Art’ by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms.” Medium, Augmenting Humanity, 25 June 2017, medium.com/@ahmed_elgammal/generating-art-by-learning-about-styles-and-deviating-from-style-norms-8037a13ae027.

Pogue, David. “Is Art Created by AI Really Art?” Scientific American, 1 Feb. 2018, www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-art-created-by-ai-really-art/.

arXiv, Emerging Technology from the. “Can This Computer-Generated Art Pass the Turing Test?” MIT Technology Review, 30 June 2017, www.technologyreview.com/s/608195/machine-creativity-beats-some-modern-art/.