Illuminate Adelaide: Will AI change the way we experience art? This artist thinks so
Artificial intelligence is being used to change the way we live, but can it be used to change the way we experience art? Illuminate Adelaide’s new artist in residence thinks so.
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Can machines think? That was the question that changed the way Ferdi Alici saw the world.
He read it about a decade ago in a 1950 scientific paper written by mathematician Alan Turing – the man famous for cracking the German Enigma Code during World War II.
But it wasn’t Alici’s view of military intelligence or codes that changed when the question was posed to him.
It was the way he thought about art.
“It changed our field and our life, that question,” the Turkish artist says over a Zoom call from the lobby of an Istanbul hotel.
“And we ask that same question with a different sense like, ‘Can machines create art? Can machines listen? Can machines write a book?’”
The answer to one of those questions, at least, is: “Yes.”
And answering it is what has led Alici to a virtual conversation from halfway around the world via a laptop screen.
Since reading Turing’s evocative question, it’s been a transformative and successful decade for Alici. The result has been Ouchhh Studios.
Thanks to the ideas sparked by that single question, Alici founded Ouchhh, a “global creative new media studio”, which he directs alongside wife Eylul. It specialises in data and artificial intelligence-driven large scale public art displays.
Since its start Ouchhh has created more than 50 entrancing art works across the globe, including in Europe, Asia and the US.
And it will bring its multi award-winning expertise to South Australia next month as Illuminate Adelaide’s luminary artist in residence.
Ouchhh’s Wisdom of AI Light exhibition, which will headline the festival, is an immersive art experience so grand that it will be housed in a specially designed pavilion measuring about 1000sq m with 8m high walls in Adelaide’s East End on a stretch of Rundle Rd between East Tce and Dequetville Tce.
The exhibition, which has been shown in Berlin and Istanbul, promises to take visitors on an immersive experience exploring Renaissance painting with the “rock stars” of art history like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.
The AI in the exhibition will examine their works among a multitude of others and recreate them with billions of “machine-learned” brushstrokes from about 20,000 paintings by more than 300 artists.
This exhibition alone is expected to attract tens of thousands of visitors.
“People will see totally new paintings made by 15 billion brushstrokes,” Alici explains. “It’s never (been) done before like this so that’s why it’s so unique.
“They will see the Mona Lisa and the other world-famous paintings without any touching from our side … then the data archives … then after that people will see the AI-machine learning creation, like a hallucination or dreaming. People will observe all that process from beginning to end.”
Alici simplifies the end product but the fact the exhibition has taken six years to create with almost 100 people contributing to the work speaks to the effort required from start to finish.
He says the projections used in the exhibition are the equivalent of about 20 IMAX movie theatres.
The technology involved is clearly complex, but the result is an experience that Illuminate co-founder Lee Cumberlidge says humans simply can’t create.
“It’s about really feeding the AI with these huge data sets that a human could never really process in that kind of time frame, and then seeing what it learns and how it reacts,” he says. “People are sharing an experience together in a large space but they’re also completely immersed in the projection. It’s around the entire space and on the floor so you’re standing within this world that the AI creates so it’s an incredible experience.”
Alici has previously brought his work to Australia, displaying Ouchhh’s art at the Melbourne Light Festival but this trip has been a long time coming.
“We are talking almost two years,” he says of the preparation to exhibit at Illuminate.
“We are always mesmerised at that festival … the reputation is amazing … the last two years we are talking about different types of opportunities to exhibit our art piece and this time I think it is the perfect angle.”
The take up of artificial intelligence in the art world has been a slow one, Alici says, but thanks to its increasing prominence in other fields, creatives are catching on.
“Starting this kind of project six years ago it (artificial intelligence) was not popular like this,” he says.
Since then Alici estimates that more than 10 million people have experienced Ouchhh’s public art displays.
The studio’s portfolio has continued to grow year on year since it was founded and Alici has collaborated with world-class institutions including L’Atelier des Lumieres, one of the largest digital museums in Paris. He says more than one million people visited that exhibition in nine months.
Despite its aesthetic appeal, Alici’s work is not only about the visual aspect.
Unlike some artists in the generations before him, he embraces the link between art and science. It’s that desire to bring the two fields together, which he likens to Leonardo da Vinci’s approach, that he believes has allowed him to create such mesmerising work.
“We have the same mindset,” he says. “That’s why we put Leonardo at the centre of the data experience, because he is not just a painter … he was using science also to understand the universe.”
Da Vinci was equally as regarded for his scientific studies as his famous artworks like the Mona Lisa. His renowned drawing, the Vitruvian Man, where he explored the proportions of the human body and combined art and mathematics is an example of the Renaissance master’s skill that Alici says Ouchhh tries to embody in its own work.
And some of that work that will be on permanent display in the Adelaide CBD as part of a joint venture between Ouchhh, Illuminate Adelaide and the City of Adelaide.
The location, theme and scale of the work, to which the City of Adelaide will contribute $300,000, are not known yet, but Cumberlidge is understandably pleased with the prospect of having the festival immortalised in his beloved city’s streets.
Ouchhh is a major drawcard for Illuminate,but it isn’t just the studio’s large-scale art works which drew Cumberlidge and fellow co-founder Rachael Azzopardi to them.
Alici’s passion for combining art and science has led to collaborations with NASA and also CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, where scientists study the matter that makes up everything around us.
The CERN project, Dark Machine, which used data from a particle accelerator, recreated the moment that two subatomic particles collided in a mesmerising journey inside some of the world’s most cutting-edge technology.
The NASA project, DATAGATE, which was the world’s first AI representation of the space agency’s data, was equally as mesmerising.
The data from both projects were so complicated that Alici and Ouchhh had to work closely with scientists to understand the information they had at their disposal.
“We couldn’t understand all that data terminology,” he says.
But for Alici that is the beauty of combining art and science. “There is a journey … and that journey is trying to show the secret of our universe,” Alici says. “We are trying to transform unseen to seen with the different art forms.”
Alici is a leader in his field and is pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved by combining art and science, and in doing so he is asking bigger questions of the way we live now.
He is asking questions like the one Alan Turing asked of him: what can AI achieve?
“Artificial intelligence already has a massive role to play in our society,” Cumberlidge says. “Whether we realise it or not it’s behind a lot of other things in our world already.”
Alici’s question on whether machines can create art has been emphatically answered – the dozens of public artworks he has created and the upcoming exhibit at Illuminate are testament to that – so is AI the new art form?
“I don’t think it’s the future of art,” Cumberlidge says.
“It’s not the only future of art; I think it’s an evolution … I think we’ll see the worlds come together more and more over time.”
Like Cumberlidge and Azzopardi, Alici doesn’t know that artificial intelligence has all the answers but he believes embracing it into art and culture will go a long way to changing people’s perceptions of the world, like Turing’s famous question changed his.
And channelling the words of the Renaissance great at the centre of his exhibition speaks to his vision: “If you want to understand the universe you need to understand the connection between art and science.”
It’s hoped the exhibition can match the success of last year’s Van Gogh Alive, which sold more than 80,000 tickets and was the talk of Adelaide. “That was one of the biggest selling ticketed events Adelaide has ever seen and that really opened our eyes to this territory of the live digital exhibition,” Cumberlidge says.
Azzopardi adds: “It’s the floor and the walls and it really takes you on a journey from Renaissance work right through to space data … it’s quite an experience.”
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