Last weekend, I went to the Whitney Biennial 2022, where at some point I noticed a group of people lying on their backs, enchanted by the movements on a set of ceiling mounted LED panels. Upon closer inspection I realized that they are watching an ever-changing pattern of shapes and colors that resembled nature’s textures like the ocean, jelly fish and blossoming flowers. The screens were interwoven with an LED net and surrounded by large aluminum panels on the walls, dripping with oil dents. The atmosphere in the room was otherworldly to say the least.
But what was truly fascinating about the installation by WangShui entitled Titration Print (Isle of Vitr⸫ous), Hyaline Seed (Isle of Vitr⸫ous), and Scr⸫pe II (Isle of Vitr⸫ous) is that this work was ‘co-authored’ by AI. The visuals displayed on LED panels are generated by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which change based on the conditions of the surrounding environment that the AI ‘senses’. In particular, active sensors pick up light levels emitted from the LED screens and CO2 levels from the viewers and use that data to evolve the screen’s patterns. As a consequence, during the night, the piece enters into a form of a resting state. The ability to adapt to and sense the ‘self’ and the surrounding world reveals a conscious and living quality of the art piece. The aluminum panel paintings on the side walls are also created by using AI generated “new images from [artist’s] previous paintings which [the artist] then sketches, collages, and abrades into the aluminum surfaces.” [source].
Both the animation and the paintings mirror nature’s textures, colors and curves, giving us a hint into what the training data consisted of. In fact, during an interview with artnet News, WangShui mentions that the training dataset is a depiction of their research subjects and in a way is the artist’s journal. It includes ‘thousands of images that span deep sea corporeality, fungal structures, cancerous cells, baroque architecture, and so much more.’
As I laid under the screen, mesmerized by the evolving shapes above me, I thought about how important the artist is in curating and framing synthetic media. Generative algorithms like GANs sooner or later will become a commonplace in artists’ toolboxes and I look forward to being a part of the community experimenting with this medium.