Artificial Humans
Benny Connings and Bernd Tyskens of Atelier Haute Cuisine, gave an AI generator (DALL-E 2) Amsterdam Light Festival's open call briefing and asked the AI to generate the concept: an interesting and timely experiment. Since the explosion of AI image generating tools the curatorial team at Amsterdam Light Festival has seen a dramatic increase in the number of AI generated images used as artist impressions in the yearly open call for concepts. Many of these text-to-image tools work via open text prompts which proceed to interpret the text into an image. That’s exactly what Benny & Bernd wanted to draw attention to.
The artists, among other things, are experts in making organic light art sculptures using different semi transparent materials, like fiberglass. For this work, they asked the AI to generate an image for “a light art installation for Amsterdam Light Festival in the theme “beyond people” made by artificial intelligence, warm white light.” But this is just an image. What interested both Atelier Haute Cuisine and us was how this image could be brought to life. The resulting artwork is a combination of an AI impression and the real techniques, hands and materials that bring that vision to life.
AI envisaged the humans all looking down, hunched over and weighed down by something. And they seem to be following each other in a herd-like manner: a rather shockingly accurate yet scathing critique of our modern lives. However the AI put nothing in the figures hands, even though it looks like they’re all looking at their phones. Was it a mistake? Can AI not see the relevance of this device in the overall impression? Or was it a creative choice on the part of the AI? That was an important thing to maintain in the overall concept: that the form of the bodies drew attention to a general feeling and not a specific behavior. These warm glowing figures are lifelike but are also cold and distant: flesh detached from feeling. Modeled off of real people, the AI’s concept has been given a living form through the masterful human hands of Benny & Bernd. Is this our future? Does the warmth we feel within still come from the people around us, or are we slowly being dragged down into the world within our devices?
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