Reflections on a tour of AI: The Imitation Game with the curator
By Tyra Schad
I recently had the privilege to tour the Vancouver Art Gallery’s newest exhibit AI:The Imitation Game: Visual Culture In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence with one of its fantastically accomplished curators, Glenn Entis. Despite the ample information available to the patrons of the gallery, hearing about the specifics of each work from the man who helped select and prepare this exhibit gave me a new level of respect for the show. Retrospectively, I selected a few works which stood out to me as uniquely thought-provoking.
AI:The Imitation Game has a number of works from different artists, each with their own take on how our relationship to the digital environment shapes the world around us and our modern culture. Seemingly in tune with the Gallery’s participatory first-floor show of Yoko Ono, AI:The Imitation Game has multiple interactive sites. Although not as hands-on as Yoko Ono’s work, these interactive pieces allow us to gain a deeper knowledge of how we connect with technology, knowingly or unknowingly, throughout our lives. When interacting with these works, Glenn Entis described how these features can be used to collect our information and help companies better predict our actions.
One of these pieces, aptly named Creepers, consists of two screens which quickly detect and track your movement as soon as you enter the space in front of them, and can track full groups all at once. When watching patrons of the gallery I began to notice that, despite the possible unnerving implications of being tracked, most people found this interaction fun, running around to test its accuracy. This show does not take a definitive stance on the safety or morality of AI, rather allowing people to gain information and make their own deductions through many modes of interaction. Instead, it leaves us with questions about our own relationships with our data.
Another notable piece is an emotion tracker, which is set up on a small screen at the end of the gallery. This system can detect emotions like fear, joy, and disgust by tracking our facial reactions. Works like this bring the viewer's attention to the more intimidating abilities of AI when it comes to our privacy, and beg the question: how much do we want computers to know about us? Are we comfortable with giving up not only our digital data, but also our real-time emotional responses? Glenn Entis encouraged us to think about the possible real-life uses of this technology. Would you want your reaction to a printed advertisement to be recorded in real-time?
As you move further into the maze-like second-floor exhibit, you may come across the acronym GAN, which stands for Generative Adversarial Network. Glenn Entis described this as a “University for Computers…” to our touring group—the neural networks are run through a GAN learning system as if being tested in school. This specific section begs a different question from the previous two. How much can machines learn and think?
Some of these ideas may seem foreign and confusing to viewers like myself, whose understanding of AI has gone no further than what’s been told to me through Science Fiction movies. Luckily, those of us with no prior context don’t need to be discouraged, because the shining star of this show is uniquely visual and easily understood. This star comes in the form of Sougwen Chung’s collaborative paintings.
Sougwen Chung has dedicated her recent life to creating art collaborations. The only difference between her and other artists is that her collaborators are made up of metal and wires. When Sougwen Chung paints, a small team of robots join her, responding in real-time to her painted strokes. On display at the gallery, you can find DOUG, the robot that has helped Sougwen Chung create her paintings. If you look closely, you can see the dried paint around the brush attachment on DOUG. Accompanying DOUG and Sougwen’s painting is a video of the process highlighting the creation and development of these little robot collaborators. If your interest is as peaked as mine, Sougwen Chung has a TEDtalk that further explores her process, titled Why I Draw With Robots, in which you can gain insight into her relationship to the computers she created as well as to digital learning as a whole.
From my own experience, I saw this exhibit as a unique look into the different forms that technology can take in our lives. We as a culture have been interested in the idea of artificial intelligence since the ’40s, and with younger generations being born into a pivotally technologically reliant world, improving digital literacy and understanding the forms it can take will become more and more important. AI and technology affect the culture as a whole as well as our individual lives, with it being our job to be curious and skeptical in equal amounts and to ask pressing questions about the morality and usefulness of these new innovations. This show gives you the questions and leaves the answers up to you. It gives you the joy of asking “Why?”
This exhibit comes at an ideal time in our lives where the lines between the digital world and the physical world are becoming more and more blurred. This exhibit presents the need to start looking into our future and deciding how our reliance on technology will shape us, for better or for worse.
Find Soungwen Chung’s TedTalk here
The Imitation Game runs March 5–Oct 23, 2022 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby St, Vancouver BC.