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  • February 14, 2025
The annual review: museums leave the AI ​​hype behind them

The annual review: museums leave the AI ​​hype behind them

The first time I put on a virtual reality headset, I was in a museum. For many in the art world, exhibitions that emerged around 2019, such as “AI: More Than Human” at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, offered first encounters with images created by generative adversarial networks (GANs) and other new machine-like networks. -vision technologies. Since the public release of applications such as Dall-E and Midjourney in 2022, images created with generative AI have become inescapable.

How should museums in this environment deal with art made with machine learning? In recent years, institutions have fallen short in navigating the hysteria and hype; Too often, their exhibitions perpetuate the enigmatic language of ‘hallucinations’ and ‘dreams’ that position the technology as an alien wonder. But in 2024, art institutions offered more thoughtful, deliberate approaches to understanding AI and its impact on creative work, shifting the conversation from the dead-end question of whether AI can make art to the question of what meaning artists can make with AI.

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Portrait of Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon. Courtesy: Herndon Dryhurst Studio

Since 2020, the Serpentine Galleries in London have published annual reports on art and cutting-edge technologies, with the understanding that institutions can present their research in formats other than exhibitions and catalogues. This year’s ‘Future Art Ecosystems’ briefing – which speculated on ‘public AI’, or technological governance for the common good – included a breakdown of the levels at which artists interact with machine learning: as users of popular applications or as competitors who build tools of their own. It is a comprehensive document aimed at cultivating an informed public.

Serpentine also organized ‘The Call’ (2024–25), an exhibition showcasing Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon’s use of AI models to compose music with an artificial version of Herndon’s voice. The pair understands voice as a means to express both an individual perspective and collective connection. In their work, the voice is both a metaphor for how AI works and an example of its use. The duo also participated in this year’s Whitney Biennale in New York with a project that offered a strategy for interacting with generative AI applications for the mass market. By means of xhairymutantx (2024), they teach Stable Diffusion to recognize Herndon as a caricature of herself – a cartoon in a green jumpsuit with enormous orange braids – so that it no longer produces photorealistic likenesses of her. At a biennial with so many artists creating spaces for disengagement and disengagement, Dryhurst and Herndon demonstrated a tactic for engaging with contemporary networks on their own terms.

Ayoung-Kim-Delivery-Dancer-2022
Ayoung Kim, Simulation of delivery dancer2022, game simulation, approx. 3.6 m, in ‘2024 Future Media FEST: Singularity’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: C-LAB, Taipei

At the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, ACC showed 2024 Future Prize winner Ayoung Kim Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverted (2024), a striking example of an artist who finds meaning in the workings of AI. The multi-channel sci-fi film follows a delivery driver who jumps across timelines as she completes her route. The images shift stylistically from anime to cinematic CGI to video game graphics, their porous contours signaling the use of machine learning. Kim maps AI’s use of probability to create images to the speculative physics of multiple possible worlds. The unity of instruments and themes reinforces the melancholic atmosphere of her story. Her exhibition was another example of an institution spotlighting an artist with a distinctive interpretation of AI, highlighting the way AI can be used in combination with other creative genres and technologies to produce emotionally impactful work.

Institutions also have an important role to play in shaping the history and context of AI. ‘2024 Future Media FEST: Singularity’ at C-LAB in Taipei showed a timeline explaining the difference between GANs, diffusion models and other machine vision technologies with a level of detail and clarity I’ve yet to see at a western museum . The group exhibition included an earlier version of Kim Dancer delivery project from 2022 and Question: Dupe Arts (2024) by the Taiwanese collective Simple Noodle Art. A YouTube tutorial on how to create the kind of abstract art you see in home furnishing catalogs was used by Simple Noodle Art to generate prompts for monochrome compositions in Stable Diffusion, with the results realized as a series of small paintings. Amid all the fuss about AI and originality, Question: Dupe Arts is a sharply funny reminder that people don’t always do that want to art to be original.

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Harold Cohen, AARON KCAT2001, screenshot, artificial intelligence software, variable dimensions. Courtesy: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York © Harold Cohen Trust

Coinciding with the biennial, the Whitney Museum presented Harold Cohen’s AARON – a venture conceived in the late 1960s – as a groundbreaking project in the field of artistic AI. The former painter spent decades coding his program, teaching it rules for selecting subjects and constructing compositions. The exhibition highlighted AARON’s growth over time and featured art from different stages of the program’s development, in various forms; software running in real time to produce digital projections and plotter drawings was accompanied by paintings composed by AARON and painted (or colored) by Cohen. Cohen played a direct role in shaping the program; Many machine learning programs we see today manage their own development without human intervention. What we call ‘AI’ is changing over time, and this exhibition puts that into perspective.

In the art world, the critical attitude all too often becomes an alibi for ignorance. Armed with a few second-hand facts about the dangers of new technologies, people refuse to learn more about them. It happened with NFTs. It’s still happening with AI. But a handful of institutions showed this year that critical engagement with new technologies doesn’t have to mean rejecting them outright – that the truly rigorous attitude is continuous learning.

Main image: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst with sub, ‘The Call’, 2024–25, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Serpentine Galleries; photo: © Leon Chew