ALGORITHMIC EMPATHY | GALLERY

CURATOR'S NOTE
by Anika Meier & Margaret Murphy

EXPANDED.ART is pleased to present the group exhibition ALGORITHMIC EMPATHY. THE PROMISES OF AI in collaboration with VerticalCrypto Art in Berlin. 16 artists explore the vast potential of future relationships between AI and creative expression to hypothesize on the not-so-distant future.

In a world where technological advancements happen in the blink of an eye, AI is being pointed to in the cultural zeitgeist as an example of a potentially bleak and ominous future. It is worth considering, however, the ways computers and machine learning can push forward creativity, human connection and philosophical dialogues.


THE PAST AND FUTURE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

For a while now, the world has been feeling increasingly off-kilter. It’s familiar and deeply foreign simultaneously: wars, pandemics, conspiracies. Ideas we hold as true changing overnight. ANOTHER AMERICA by Phillip Toledano is a reflection of this uncertain world. It shows us the familiar, but not. Set in the late 1940s, a time close to the beginning of photography, when a photograph was the truth. Finally, how else to address the idea of uncertainty than with the technology, Artificial Intelligence, that is making the world uncertain.

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT by Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek reflects the dawn of a new era shaped by AI. Everything as we know it will change. We can no longer trust photography; the boundaries between fiction and reality have become fluid.

PHOTO FINISH by Far explores the impact of technological progress, in concrete AI, and its influence on visual culture, featuring the horse as a central symbol. The artwork references its historical significance in the work of Eadweard Muybridge, where the horse served as an object for capturing the passage of time with photography and ultimately led to the development of motion pictures. Far explores the introduction of new technological players in the visual production process, specifically focusing on AI-generated images of horse races. PHOTO FINISH is created in two steps: first, an AI model trained on actual race photos generates a speed photo of a horse race; second, the pixels of the AI-generated image are dismantled and reorganized, reinstilling a sense of velocity.

LONGING by Olivera Đurđević seeks to capture the visual essence of longing and the search for solace in the face of loss. Đurđević, inspired by the passing of her late father, uses AI to process her grief. The landscapes often feature small, distant figures and lost animals enveloped in a haze, symbolizing the arduous process of letting go and the emotional turmoil that arises from losing a loved one. Đurđević also showcases AI’s ability in reimagining the 19th-century photographic printing process known as gum bichromate. Each piece in this collection was crafted using solely AI algorithms, paying homage to the delicate balance of beauty and nostalgia that characterized the original process.


BEYOND THE BINARY WORLD

THE ANGELS by Anna Condo is her subtle way of saying "I care about you and your future". When she stumbled by accident onto one of the ANGELS' outputs, she almost walked off, thinking they looked too real, too Teen Vogue. But the angels wouldn’t leave her mind. She remembered being a teenager and wanting to be taken seriously and not seen as an object of desire. "The treatment of women in the world remains horrendous. Abortion still being an issue today is primitive, disappointing, and infuriating. My heart goes out to all the young women and men, too, whose lives are manipulated as if they were mere puppets by self-serving hypocrites", Condo says.

AMARANTHINE REVERIES by Ellie Pritts is a collection of AI-animated self-portrait videos exploring the boundaries between our physical bodies and the essence of who we are at our core. In Pritts’ practice using themselves as source material with AI, the artist finds that the AI feels much more empathetic to who they are than they do to themselves. The outputs are devoid of inner criticism and body dysmorphia, an unexpected but ultimately very liberating result.

ALGORITHMIC ZONES OF IMMATERIAL PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY by Mikey Woodbridge & Ezra Shibboleth presents noise nearing the possibility of empathy, deflected by the bias for form and the limitations of gender. They explore seven empty semantic zones in order to locate the possibility of sensitivity and sensibility in the latent space of a text-to-image diffusion model. This series uses object pronouns, which represent the recipients of actions, as a means to probe empathy. The resulting pictorial outputs expose a potential zone of sensibility in the model's latent space, as well as the barriers to that potential.

WATER BODY by Kira Xonorika deals with the binaries between man and woman, East and West, human and animal, and human and non-human intelligence that have been created to solidify colonial power infrastructures in the West. However, we often see in nature and beyond how these boundaries are always blurry. This collaborative work with AI connects ancestral and feminized aquatic mythologies through digital skins to reimagine future visions.

Combing artificial intelligence with the practices of magic and alchemy, DWELLERS BETWEEN THE WATERS by Crosslucid seeks possible solutions in response to the traumas of contemporary anthropos and examines how artificial intelligence, in terms of artistic practice, remains integral to our contemporary condition, that is, the ever-evolving climate crisis and the sixth extinction of species, coupled with wars, inflation, and capitalist exploitations.


THE PROMISE OF A SUPERIOR AI

EMP LAB by Lars Nagler is a glimpse into a large science complex that represents the big brain of AI. At least, that's how Nagler imagines it. Many small groups are working in multidisciplinary ways to try to answer the question of the exhibition: What are the promises of AI? The AI draws from a great wealth of knowledge and imagines itself. There are young groups that playfully work on synthetic-organic interfaces. There are holodeck levels on which final haptic tests are carried out. There are sleep labs where mind expansion and awareness reign supreme. For Nagler, working with AI is an alchemical process. Diverse and nuanced ingredients result in the expected or even more surprising results and artworks. It is supremely satisfying to take up a narration of your own.

Skye Nicolas examines ChatGPT’s declarative arguments on why AI-created art is intellectually superior, using the prompt: “Provide a digital minimalist conceptual art piece making the argument why AI-created art is intellectually superior and why it should be minted as an NFT.” In the series THE INTELLECTUAL SUPERIORITY OF AI-CREATED ART, Nicolas extends his exploration of text-rich triptychs with META PROSE, a conceptual exercise in authorship using AI technology to produce artworks from a flowing stream of online collective consciousness.

YELLOW FILM, from the series ABSTRACT SPACE by Chiara Passa, is a contemplative artwork built by queries asked of GPT3, answers obtained by manipulating images through GAN, and music generated by an AI. The artwork shows a minimalist space that narrates the void through the vision of a place in continuous transformation. The minimalist space is designed by the shadows of geometric volumes created by extruding the silhouette of the primitives along the direction of the light source. A new, vibrant place arises under the eyes of the viewers, oscillating between virtual and real perception.

Cover image: Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek