Manuel Rossner
I Wrote This Script 1
Manuel Rossner curated his first digital exhibition project Float Gallery in 2012, which included Jeremy Bailey's 2004 piece VIDEO PAINT 1.0 in which Bailey describes the benefits of a painting software he designed. Such benefits include clean hands, material savings, and automatically added words such as "war" and "love" for meaning. The presentation begins with the lines "I wrote this program...," emphasizing his excitement about transforming how art is created.
19 years after VIDEO PAINT 1.0, Rossner chatted with artificial intelligence to create the work I WROTE THIS SCRIPT. This assertion, however, is not made by him. The full statement is "I, ChatGPT, an OpenAI language model, wrote the script for the organic form in Unity that you requested earlier."
Rossner has spent the last decade creating digital exhibition spaces with the game engine Unity. He expressed to the AI his artistic questions about how to make art in metaverses, as well as specific elements fundamental to his work, such as the use of contrasting colors. The AI produced the necessary script to "build" the work after giving approaches for what the artwork could be. When asked who made the piece, the AI refuses to answer because it claims it was never created. "Whoever brings this idea to life is the creator."
The AI's script was written specifically for the Unity game engine. Rossner copied and pasted it, made a few adjustments and then ran it through New Float, his recently launched updated iteration of Float Gallery. The software and Rossner's environment gave a framework to the script, making him the work's creator, according to the AI.
Rossner is known for recreating physical exhibition spaces like the Grand Palais Éphemère, and Kunsthalle Zürich in digital form. By providing a spatial context for his own work, his colleagues' and the work of traditional artists like Gerhard Richter or Cy Twomboly, he expands the art experience to the digital.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
I WROTE THIS SCRIPT, the series of five works by Manuel Rossner, is part of the exhibition RECOLLECTION. AI AND MEMORY presented by EXPANDED.ART in collaboration with The NFT Gallery at their galleries in New York and London, 11 April – 13 May 2023.
19 artists explore the idea of further challenging the concreteness of human memory—personal or collective—through creative collaboration with AI.
Memories are nebulous. Scientific studies and phenomena such as "The Mandela Effect" have shown that humans rarely recall things in their unbiased exactitude. Artificial Intelligence already assists human memory in the form of predictive text and GPS navigation. One would surmise that there exists a role for AI when it comes to supplementing even more complex memory.
Artists: Ilya Bliznets, Crashblossom, Anna Dart, Olga Fedorova, Ross Goodwin, Danielle King, Margaret Murphy, Kika Nicolela, Roope Rainisto, Daria Rastunina, Manuel Rossner, Travis LeRoy Southworth, Anne Spalter, Nathaniel Stern, Sasha Stiles, Stephan Vasement, Nicola Villa, Sabato Visconti, and Erika Weitz.
ABOUT THE NFT
Contract address: 0xb390a1ec8f2ad6270b8e892c99426c95751a895a
Token Standard: ERC-721
Blockchain: Ethereum
Metadata: Frozen and decentralized