Automata Approach

Mike Beradino
Tega Brain
Sam Lavigne
Everest Pipkin
Jeff Thompson

3/27/20 - 5/9/20

Opens Friday, March 27th, 7-10pm

Data has become the world’s most important resource, the life-blood of modern society — a currency, an arbiter of value and meaning, a way of making sense of our chaotic world, and a potent tool for control and liberation. It also constitutes the raw material of AI systems, training models that imitate and approximate the logic of human decision-making, to our benefit or peril. 

The transformation of data into meaning is ancient, but new ways of shaping data into forms that are tactile, tangible, and aesthetic are emerging, with artists at the forefront. 

In computer science, primitives refer to fundamental data types that cannot be broken down into simpler structures. Automata Approach alludes to foundational role of data in modern systems; and, in the context of the show, it also locates the present as an early stage in an increasingly data-driven world and in the movement by artists to use data to express and shed light on the hidden dynamics of this world.

Questions for the AI Age:
 

What are the mathematical and logical operations that, repeated unimaginable times, constitute machine intelligence?

What do we look like to a computer vision system?

What datasets trained the AI algorithms that interpret our intensions and desires? How do they bias our interactions?

What sort of art might an AI system produce untethered from our intentions?

How can machine learning help us deconstruct propaganda by detecting unseen patterns of thought and representation?

How would beings in an AI-generated world behave and evolve?

What might an AI poetics look like?

The artists in Automata Approach pose, wrestle with, and propose answers to these questions, aestheticizing the ways machine learning and AI operate and make sense of the world, and speculating on the effects of these operations on our lived experience.

Using public datasets, machine learning algorithms, and computer programming as their raw material, the artists in the exhibition seek to make the invisible coded world of AI interpretable.