A.I and seems to have dominated the art world, perhaps the world in general, when it comes to innovations and technological advances. Although we may think A.I has no place in art, or that it is separate from it, still it seeps into every aspect of our lives, even in new and exciting ways. Technology can help us understand many things, and when applied to art it may also help us understand beauty, truth and the pursuit of knowledge. I’d like to quote Marcus Auralius here, who once said, “Human Life. Duration: momentary…Condition of body: decaying…Then what can guide us? Only philosophy. ” Although written almost 2 millennia ago, we can apply his ideas to A.I art because of the ever changing nature of it. We grapple with our mortality through art, and A.I may help us further this philosophical journey by looking at life in different ways. But, when someone creates such art, how do we preserve it? With the technological world changing at such rapid rates, the art itself is not stable and must change too, right?
A.I is frightening because it can seem infinite or everlasting. An everlasting knowledge infinitely smarter than we are, and infinitely seeking more knowledge or going towards the truth. At least, that’s how we perceive it to be. However, A.I decays, like the human body, like our bodies and eventually will perish like we do. Only the persistence of truth seeking is the real eternity, something that humans continually seek, but A.I can only do what we program it to do. A.I is one of the ways in which humans will continue on the journey to find absolute truth, but it is not the way to truth. It morphs, changes, decays in a sense, just like we do.
Take for example the piece Digital Whispers (2016) by Jake Elwes (1993). In this piece, an A.I generated computer captures tweets in a 2 mile radius and whispers them out into the gallery as a live performance. Something of this nature was meant to last forever, and in theory it could if the software it was programmed into did not become obsolete only 3 years later. Now, the piece lives on but as a recording of a past performance. Is something like this eternal? Or, is it now simply a recording of the past?
We can see another example in the work by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu titled Can’t Help Myself (2016-2019), a famous piece displayed in its finality at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The robotic arm was programmed with visual recognition and sensors, to tell if the blood-like oil was pooling too far away from its body and to scrape it back to itself. However, it was slowly losing this oil from itself, and eventually the planned obsolescence then “kills” this machine. It eventually dies due to the nature of the piece itself, an A.I generated piece of machine is now dead. I remember hearing about the piece when it was first introduced and thought nothing of it really, but once it stopped working in 2019 I remember being amazed at the piece, and then feeling a connection to its purpose and message.
This piece is particularly engaging because it personifies human nature far too well. In the beginning, the robot is not too concerned with the oil seeping out of its body, and the main concern is to interact with the crowd watching it. It seems like a carefree creature connecting with other like-minded beings. However, as the years go on the oil seeps out more and more, so much so that the only concern for this creature is to bring the oil back into itself, saving it from shutting down. Eventually the spill is too great, and the robot ceases to function. A planned obsolescence from its conception to death. Perhaps how we as humans are brought into the world. It is unavoidable that we will die the second we are born.
The decadence is in the sustainability for preserving these types of A.I artwork. Artists who use technology of any sort will run into this issue, as well as curators who try to preserve the works. But there are also the ethical issues that curators run into when posed with preserving these artworks. If the piece must be recorded and transferred onto different hard-drives, is the work still the same? Does its meaning or message change? Is this decay of preservation inevitable?
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