Graham Asker
‘The Street’ , 2022-24, installation (1/18th scale), wood, electronics, AI (used to create the figures).
From the “Radio Age '' to the “AI Age '' in one lifetime.
Life for children in the 40’s and 50’s was often boring but for me there were exciting moments such as the Beano comic on Tuesdays, and our annual seaside holiday. Occasionally a trip on a tram with my dad to the Science Museum. There, down in its basement, were scale model buildings and machines in glass cases. I could press buttons to light up the buildings and start the machines. A magical world for a child who had never even seen a television - now, 70 years on, AI. More fun !
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Nick Hazzard
AI has been around since the 1950s but it really exploded into the general public’s consciousness on 30 November 2022 when ChatGPT was launched. I discovered it shortly afterwards, but it was the image generating abilities of Stable Diffusion that amazed me. No one thought AI would threaten the creative industries, but here was a way to create art with text. It seemed magical, and made me think this is what it must have felt like when the printing press was invented.
I think AI is going to fundamentally change many things, and that’s both exciting and scary. It will open up many possibilities while destroying many dreams. Will it take over? If we let it. And if you look at what the internet has done to society, the omens aren’t good. I’ve always been interested in new technology and this is easily the most important. But where’s it taking us and how fast will we get there? That’s what intrigues me.
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Alex Sivov
My work is a visual response to what I read in the newspaper and mass media. Intrigued by a news article (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/security-lancaster/about/news/ai-generated- faces-are-more-trustworthy-than-real-faces-say-researchers-who-warn-of-deep-fakes-1), discussing how AI created portrait to be more trustworthy than real human beings’ photographs, I began creating portraits from real and AI-generated pictures, aiming to discern any differences in my creative process between real and synthetic subjects. To simulate the diverse array of information processed by AI in its creative endeavors, I employ a technique of mixing various elements from previously crafted portraits. This approach imbues the portraits with a timeless and genderless quality, bordering on the surreal.
I adopted the etching technique to highlight the human hand ' presence. Then I use the silk screen printing technique to reproduce and transform them on different scales, giving them a stronger stance.
Through this fusion of traditional and contemporary techniques, my work aims to provoke thought and dialogue surrounding the intersection of human creativity and artificial intelligence, ultimately challenging perceptions of our humanity, of authenticity and authorship in the realm of portraiture.
Renee Rilexie
“Being Human in a Digital Era” (2015 - Now) is an ongoing exploration into the world of technology.
Renee sculptural work offers a compelling exploration of the human condition in the digital era. By utilizing intricately embellished human heads, she thoughtfully examines the impact of rapidly advancing digital technologies on our relationships with ourselves and others.
In this day and age it would be more convenient to digitally render and 3D print these pieces but Rilexie’s process of manually, delicately, unhurriedly handling and inserting thousands of SIM cards and over 300,000 (to date) pins into the scalps and faces of these automatons favours physical and temporal experience over convenience, and the resulting work rewards eye- contact over snap-shot. It’s slow work in the face of the scramble for super-fast connection speeds.
The artist’s aim however is not to preach, but to invite a pause for thought, prompting us to reflect on how we interact with and value the tangible over the digital, the actual over the virtual and meditation over instantaneity.
Are we becoming more machines? How much brain muscle do we use for better health and how much is it trained to think and behave like AI.