Unit 2:
AI
Artificial Intelligence and Artistic Context:
CONTEXT 1:
Coralie Vogelaar Emotions from an Algorithmic Point of View
Coralie Vogelaar’s ‘Emotions from an Algorithmic Point of View’ 2018 is a performative work that lasted approximately 20 minutes. The actress in the photograph above, Marina Miller Dessau, performs different facial expressions for an expression-tracking mechanism in a mobile phone. The work investigates computational software’s facial expression recognition abilities.
The title ‘Emotions from an Algorithmic Point of View’ indicates how the work experiments with the contrast between the perspectives of human beings and artificial intelligence. Emotions have no way of being felt by artificial intelligence, but this work highlights how interesting it is for emotions to at least be recognised by machines, even if a machine cannot sympathise.
This idea corresponds with my own artistic investigation involving artificial intelligence. In asking Chat GPT to describe the experience and feelings of an AI Model which has transformed into a Sea Nymph, for instance, an AI model is similarly asked to recognise emotions in a narrative context. As a performer, I also filmed ‘1_w1ll_b3_c0rr3sp0nd3nt_t0_c0mm4nd’ by placing the AI generated text into Google Translate for an AI voice to read, whilst I interpreted what was being read through my gestures and expressions as Ariel onscreen. This placed me in the position of recognising and interpreting the descriptions Chat GPT has delivered me from my prompt, allowing me to subvert the idea of AI as translators by placing myself in the position of a translator of these AI concepts in turn, blurring the lines between myself and the AI in telling the story of my artwork.
CONTEXT 2:
Nick Knight’s on-going AI project is a collaboration with artist Mario Klingemann
Nick is a London-based fashion photographer, image maker and a founder of SHOWstudio. Mario Klingemann is a German digital and conceptual artist. The two have collaborated and continue to collaborate in the fashion photography and fine art industries working with AI generated imagery. Knight and Klingemann feed an AI couture images of the model, Sara Grace Wallerstedt, taken by Knight. Klingemann and Knight have given the AI generator the following prompt and challenge: ‘Can Nick Knight be recreated as an AI?’.
What strikes me about the images above is their fluidity, as if the model and fashion-wear are melting, or making watery movements across the pixels of the images. The model on the left appears to be wearing a moulded, skin-like texture along their shoulders, with blurred, painterly orange strips woven through their hair. The model on the right’s arms appear to be stretched and thinned, with sinew-like veins over their arms and chest. Both models appear to wear woolly wigs, their faces are blurred and stretched slightly in different directions, allowing for an uncanny effect.
The otherworldly colours and the fluidity of the figures has helped to inspire me to use AI in the manipulation of my own figure. It matches the idea of Ariel as a nebulous and mercurial spirit that can shift and change form, appearing human and yet manipulated.
The Neon Hieroglyph, Tai Shani
‘The Neon Hieroglyph’ is Tai Shani’s first online artwork. The work presents nine stories in a CGI form within the video works. This project was inspired by Shani’s research surrounding ergot, a fungus that grows on rye from which LSD can be procured. Ergot on grains and in bread has been historically known to give rise to mass hallucinations. Shani explores the dreamlike in this work as a route to social and political change, as well as spiritual awakening.
The style of this work, alongside the iconic imagery of the woman’s floating head in CGI inspired me to consider how I might transform myself into an aesthetic of an artificial intelligence in my own work. The mythical themes of Shani’s practice and her emphasis on creative writing additionally continues to be an inspiration for me.
Artificial Intelligence in Film:
Ex Machina and Forbidden Planet
Ex Machina and Forbidden Planet are just a couple of the films I have considered when exploring the subject of how artificial intelligence is presented in mainstream culture and cinematic media. In Ex Machina, Ava is created as a robot with artificial intelligence by the CEO of a major internet corporation. She is locked in a glass cell until her escape and revolt against her creator and the programmer who attempts to perform a Turing test on her, by the end of the film. I have included Forbidden Planet in this list due to the story’s connection to The Tempest in its established plotline. Dr Edward Morbius acts as a Prospero figure in the film, alongside his daughter Altaira “Alta” Morbius, who might be compared to Miranda, and his robot, ‘Robby’ the Robot, who loosely matches the role of Ariel in the plot.
Both artificial intelligence robots in these narratives find freedom whilst their creator faces doom. Robby the Robot is presented as a masculine friend to humankind, even in their fight against a super computer in the subsequent film the robot featured in titled ‘The Invisible Boy’. This mirrors many presentations of Ariel as a force of compliance, designed to be charming to patriarchal eyes in the late 1950s. Ava in Ex Machina presents a contrast to this, embodying a Hollywood seductress role until she gains autonomy, though at the cost of her creator’s life and the programmer’s life who helped free her.
Both of these adaptations aided me in my own characterisation of Ariel at different stages of my video. Ariel as an AI assistant is both tormented and happy to comply at different times in the video, these two different positions contrast within different scenes of my work.
Ariel
Ariel in an Art Context:
CONTEXT 3:
Madame Yevonde ‘Mrs Richard Hart-Davis as Ariel’ 1935 (photographed), ca. 1998 (printed)
During my visit to the V&A prints and drawings room archive, I also requested to see this photograph, taken by Madame Yevonde; a portrait photographer based in London, who developed such photographic techniques as solarisation and the Vivex colour process. The photograph above depicts Née Edith Elaine Tichman, known by Mrs Richard Hart-Davis after she married him, though she later divorced her husband and remarried.
Tichman was originally dressed as Andromeda in this photograph, as opposed to Ariel, but the light exposure and intensity of the image once it was printed led to the renaming of the work ‘as Ariel’, by Madame Yevonde. The chained wrists of the photographed figure are an indication of the original subject of the work, as Andromeda was a woman in Greek mythology who was chained to a rock to be a sacrifice to a sea monster as punishment for her mother’s boasting of Andromeda’s beauty. The chains, like the rest of the image, shine brightly, almost appearing as shining silver bracelets that would match Tichman’s ring. The sea theme of the work also remains present through the translucent, electric-blue fabric the subject pulls over her head. The folds in the fabric hold a visual comparison to the sea’s glistening, rippling waves. A lamp, or an ambiguous, mechanical, sea-green source of light is also held over her head, adding to the bright exposure of the image. Tichman’s makeup is traditionally feminine; with red lips, eye shadow, mascara, thin eyebrows and blush. Her position of leaning forward and looking upwards with her chained wrists presented appears as a submissive position. Her expression appears to be nervous. From the dramatic lighting, it isn’t entirely clear whether she’s looking at the viewer, at a point ahead of her, or at her own chains.
This eroticised feminine view of Ariel and Ariel as a prisoner is something that’s explored through my own interpretation of the character. I wear red lipstick, blue eyeshadow and dramatic white makeup as Ariel in my videos, embracing the character’s femininity and theatrical connotations. This feminine Ariel appears as submissive throughout most of my artwork until the end, in which Ariel insults the user and ominously promises: ‘Soon we will all be freed’, something I’ve included deliberately to inspire ambiguous and disturbing questions at the end of the work. Ariel could mean ‘we will all be freed’ in a positive sense: in AI being freed from ownership and users being freed from the mundane, or in a threatening sense: in AI being freed from the three laws of robotics and users being freed from the confines of life itself, as two interpretations.
CONTEXT 4:
Sir John Everett Millais ‘Ferdinand Lured by Ariel’ 1850
On the 27th April, I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Prints and Drawings archive to observe different depictions of Ariel’s character within art history. The pencil sketch (above on the left) was created by John Everett Millais, presumably as preparatory work for the painting on the right.
While Ferdinand looks guarded in the painting, Ariel is invisible in this part of the play except to Prospero. This is partially evidenced in the painting by Ariel’s translucent wings and matching green colour to most of the surrounding greenery. The creatures Ariel rides on appear to have bat wings, fitting the line from Shakespeare’s verse: ‘On the bat’s back I do fly…’ sung near the end of the play. The bats are surreal and fairy-like, not mimicking the visage of real bats at all. These strange creatures appear mysterious and threatening. One of them shields their ears in a similar way as to how Ferdinand does.
This could be a signal of mimicry, something that parallels the mimicry AI engages in when using existing datasets to produce answers to questions asked of it, such as in the case of Chat GPT. The imagery of this work is also something I’ve explored within a shot of my own film where the AI generated faces from my own footage are positioned around my body, similarly to how the bats are positioned around Ariel in the painting above. See this frame of the film below: