The School of Art’s Studio 3 Gallery is launching a new exhibition today, entitled ‘AI and I’.
The exhibition has been curated by Alice C. Helliwell, who is currently on the PhD in the History and Philosophy of Art, and Studio 3 Gallery curator Dr Eleen M Deprez, as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms.
The exhibition is an experiment: using works from the Kent Print Collection, the exhibition explores how AI can facilitate curating and enhance the visitor’s experience of art.
AI broadly refers to technologies that create intelligence in a computational machine. Some AI recreates human behaviour (such as writing a text or identifying objects in a picture). Others aim to go beyond our human capabilities, avoiding human error. AI has an increasingly wide application, from face recognition on social media, to voice assistants Siri and Alexa. In the arts, people are developing AI that can identify, evaluate and create artworks.
The exhibition explores these possibilities by utilising a number of AI technologies. AI was used to help select, design, interpret and describe the works on display. Google Vision API suggested how works could be displayed together and EyeEm helped inform which works were aesthetically pleasing. AI looked carefully at the various portraits in the collection and suggested matching faces in other works of art. GPT-2 wrote short narratives based on the works. The ‘AI and YOU’ section of the display is designed to encourage you to try out some of the technologies yourself.
The exhibition will run from Thursday 23 January to Thursday 20 February 2020. The gallery is open Monday to Friday, from 10am to 5pm.
For more details of the Studio 3 Gallery, please see the page here:
https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/studio3gallery/
UPDATE: A photo gallery from the exhibition, its set up, and a talk asking ‘Can AI be Creative?’ by PhD student Alice C Helliwell can be found here:
www.facebook.com/pg/unikentarts/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2693602707360513