Creative AI: machine learning as a medium in artistic and curatorial practice

Contemporary art institutions find themselves at the forefront of a wider cultural reflection on critical issues of social and ethical importance. In relation to Artificial Intelligence, however, cultural institutions are in a paradoxical position: on the one side, there is a pressing need to reflect critically and creatively on the ethical and societal impact of AI, and for this AI artworks play a pivotal role. On the other side, cultural institutions often do not have the necessary technical knowledge to support the production of such works, despite the fact that artists such as Trevor Paglen or Adam Harvey have made important contributions by critically using and questioning AI. This project aims to tackle this lack of curatorial knowledge by building tools and guidance for curators to advance institutional media literacy in AI.

Faced with the situation that AI is currently having a transformational impact on our cultures and societies, and given the fact that exhibitions featuring AI artworks are central for delivering critical and ethical inquiries into this technology as well as for advancing a much needed public understanding, our project asks: how can we strengthen curatorial knowledge about AI artworks?

To answer this question and research the missing knowledge of this new artistic medium, our project brings together researchers, artists, cultural practitioners and technologists by connecting the networks of two academic - KCL and NYU - and two contemporary art institutions - Serpentine Galleries and Rhizome/New Museum - situated in London and New York, two centres of both, contemporary art and AI. Each institution has gained its own genuine expertise in the emerging field of Creative AI: In July 2019, Serpentine Galleries have founded a Creative AI lab in collaboration with the Department of Digital Humanities, KCL, with the aim of exploring AI as a tool for artists and gaining a better understanding of the digital skills needed to support critical artistic engagement with this new technology. Around the same time, NYU's Digital Theory lab launched an inquiry into AI Aesthetics, and Rhizome/New Museum started to deliver workshops for artists exploring AI.

Bringing these initiatives into a closer dialogue with one another by linking up their genuine knowledge through collaborative research and a series of workshops, the project will proceed in two steps. Firstly, the project will map existing creative AI tools and explain them targeting curators and artists; and explore how AI technology transforms artistic and with it curatorial practice, to be able to create a systematic introduction into the digital skills and knowledge curators need. Having understood aspects of production of AI artworks, the project will use this knowledge base for a second step, to explore how curators can translate the impact of this new technology into a critical but also creative response. For this, the project systematically studies the social, ethical, and last but not least the aesthetic aspects of contemporary AI.

To explore and verify the above mentioned findings, the project will set up a creative AI experiment that runs parallel to its theoretical explorations. Together with a software engineer, a chatbot prototype will be built, designed intentionally to make aspects of the decision-making process of its AI technology visible through an innovative interface; the interface will reveal decision-making aspects when interacting. The chatbot will be trained on a dataset of interviews which the Serpentine Galleries's Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting and recording with artists, architects and thinkers on subjects of art and culture.

Researchers and partners participating in this project share the insight that AI technology profits from and needs more cultural exploration. This project will provide curators with the right skills to support and inquire this technology.

Overview: This research will directly and immediately benefit anyone working with or about Creative Artificial Intelligence, first and foremost contemporary art galleries as well as more generally cultural institutions interested in involving artworks using Machine Learning; artists working with AI; start-up and computer companies invested in Creative AI; last but not least, our research will engage with and impact the public discourse about AI and ethics by making aspects of AI transparent to a general audience.

Art galleries and cultural institutions: the needs of contemporary art galleries are central to this project and it is here where we will impact most clearly. Some of the project's outcomes - the AI tool map, the webinars, the project website, the reports - are targeted at contemporary art galleries working with AI - to inform their curatorial practice by delivering knowledge relevant for budgeting, managing and commissioning a new artwork involving AI, or by preparing the artwork's exhibition including the information that should be displayed or be covered in a catalogue, be explained in guided tours or introduced at associated events. This information is not just relevant for contemporary art galleries but also for the 1,800 museums registered with the Museum Association, of whom many are interested in using AI in a creative way to playfully process parts of their digitised collection.

Artists: Some of the project's findings inform artists who are working with or would like to work with Machine Learning, for whom the introductory overview of existing tools to produce Creative AI is providing guidance, and who can act on the information of the webinars introducing the calibration of neural networks through interfaces often used by artists, and who want to learn about central issues regarding training data and aesthetic theories and societal topics linked to AI.

Start-up and computer companies: Companies such as Adobe as well as start-ups explore the creative application of Machine Learning and our research into its usage in artworks provides pointers for this industry. Furthermore, the explainability of AI has become a recognised issue, to which our practical research experiment building a chatbot prototype whose interface reveals its decision-making process will contribute.

General public: Given the fact that AI has become an omnipresent technology - from suggesting words when we text on our smartphones to wrongly or rightly identifying criminals for the Metropolitan Police using facial recognition -, the efforts of this project will directly (in its public facing events) and indirectly (through allowing cultural institutions to stage more of them) have an impact on the general public. This is the more the case as the exhibition at the Barbican, London 'AI: More than Human' was highly successful showing that there is a strong interest by the general public to engage with this topic.

Engaging with non-academic players is a profound part of this research project and having impact on the areas above will be actively initiated. We will approach players in the non-academic areas named above, whether this is via inviting them as guest speakers or to come to our events, or to give semi-structured expert interviews (artists, computer industry), or through spreading our findings via the social-media accounts of the four participating partners in this project.