[Music] this is a historical exhibition about the relationship between art and Technology the way that artists chose to experiment with and collaborate with machines and scientific ways of thinking in many ways science in general is a way to peel back the onion of reality there's an intuitive way of looking at the world and the more you look into how it actually functions at a microscopic or microscopic level the further away it gets from how it understands it to be and so for many of these artists making art that was uh based in ways of dissecting
Vision was also a way of revealing aspects of reality that were not necessarily directly inter [Music] the relationship between artist and technology is a complicated subject and many of the artists in this exhibition have approached it from very different perspectives and points of view so there are some that were all too happy to collaborate with uh say uh corporate Laboratories um if that gave them access to the kind of instruments that they wanted to experiment with whereas others were very wary of being instrumentalized by the commercial or military interest that were behind Innovation and so
many of these artists were quite overtly trying to subvert that relationship and trying to reclaim Science and Technology from their functional and destructive purposes and to make something creative beautiful and rooted in humanistic values in the mid 80s I had a boyfriend who used to spend a lot of time in video game arcades to mostly shoot them ups and I started to wonder about how these kind of new technologies might evolve and how they might affect humanity and Society in the future and so I started making a series of paintings which were video game Stills
exploring those kind of ideas sensing that those Technologies could be used for something really negative by the wrong people I was trying to embed my work with some other type of ethic spirituality other possible directions I was very aware that there were different different possible evolutions for technology depending on who was using it and so I've always been really concerned about who's using it and for what because the technology itself is not necessarily the active thing for me it's always about who uses the technology and Technology itself could be used for fantastic [Music] things my
reasons for choosing to stop the period of the exhibition before the widespread adoption of the internet is because um the internet uh is more of a social uh environment for technology at least up until recently uh the primary purpose for the internet was to share knowledge and connect people and now with uh uh the new wave of um experiments on artificial intelligence it feels like it's less about talking to other people and it's returning to conversations between humans and machines and trying to Grapple with what it means what did that mean for creativity again a
very off to-day conversation at the time there was a lot of skepticism about so where where does human creativity uh end and uh does the machine take over and so from my perspective it was quite interesting to kind of set aside everything that has to do with the internet strip back that conversation and go back to Art and automation what does that do in terms of um uh human creativity what does that say about the human impulse to work with [Music] machines a lot of the exhibition uh I conceived as a sort of origin story
for generative art the idea of setting yourself a set of rules uh to follow in order to generate the work whose outcome you don't know yet when you start the process is still um a valid way of of describing generative art today and there's a lesson there in the way that artists can learn how to use artificial intelligence as a way of thinking about intelligence in general artificial intelligence is very very powerful developing technology it's going faster than we possibly imagined and its possible Futures are possibly at also beyond our imagination whether we're going to
reach the singularity and go past it whether uh we will have a planet controlled by Machine intelligence uh we don't know those things I've always been interested in the idea of trying to affect more positive Futures I think it's a really crucial moment for the right people to start using it for really positive outcomes to help restore the planet for medicine for interesting conceptual art healing spirituality we need to start focusing on how to use it in positive ways what I love about this kind of work is that precisely it captivates the viewer uh and
it functions without them having any preconceived knowledge about what it is that they're looking they're just uh interested in the visual effects and then the um uh analytical process begins of thinking about why and how uh what they see is like they see it [Music]
