Reconstructing Human Identity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Editorial by Kiera Xinyue Huang
Artist: Tony Oursler
Can artificial intelligence be fully harnessed by humans? Are new cultures and styles emerging from the collision of AI and human civilization? Is this a good or bad thing for humanity ?
Renowned American multimedia and video artist Tony Oursler presents a series of previously unseen glass works at Stockholm’s Forsblom Gallery.
Robotic glass sculptures with artificial intelligence, miniature flat screens, exposed computer circuits, and various figuratively arranged materials are displayed alongside flowchart-based two-dimensional screens in the exhibition. The chimeric robots relate to Oursler’s ongoing interest in our daily interactions with technology and question the intelligence of AI systems.
The exhibition depicts an inescapable world in which self-help, new age, and incentive programs are fused or transferred to AI systems, creating low-fidelity singularities with unforeseen, humorous, and disturbing results.
These forms of self-illumination are as relevant to the context of robotics as they are to camouflaged cell phone towers, video games, and scarecrows. They play with the notion of how artificial intelligence can help us achieve or not achieve our goals. They also question whether these AIs will choose to form new and bizarre physical identities through remnants of human artifacts and culture.
The messy senses, strange torsos, and chaotic combinations in the work are undoubtedly a poor imitation of human information and unsystematic learning captured at the beginning of the AI, AI and the human brain are destined to have obvious strengths and weaknesses and differences with completely different starting points and learning systems. Whether this difference diminishes in the future due to the AI’s learning evolution, and whether the AI’s learning gains will be integrated into human art and culture, is a question that the artist himself has left the audience with through his works to ponder.
