19 april 2024, Flor Linckens
A dialogue between art and artificial intelligence
Until 23 June, HEEJSTECK# in Utrecht presents the group exhibition 'ˌai ˌai ˈai (intrinsic gestures)'. In an era in which artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in our daily lives, many strive to preserve the 'real' and 'authentic' in art, exemplified by using prominent hashtags like #nofilter and #ArtByHumans on social media. New technology often revives old debates, such as the unique aura of art in an age of reproduction (Walter Benjamin), or the Labor Theory of Value from economists like Adam Smith — in which the value of an object should be measured based on the labour hours and skilled craftsmanship required to produce it. However, reality is more complex, consider for example conceptual art, that entails that the idea is often more significant than the resulting object. The exhibition at HEEJSTECK# challenges both artists and viewers to think about the role of technology in the creative process.
Niels Post is fascinated by spam — from unwanted vague promises in your inbox to spam comments on social media. These sentences are often incoherent due to poor translations, strange contexts or deliberate spelling errors to evade spam filters. Post isolates these words and phrases, which can suddenly appear poetic, philosophical or even humorous. He then places these texts on hand-sawn plywood, sometimes in collaboration with artist Petra van Noort, adding a certain level of (labour-intensive) handcrafting to the process.
Katie Hallam intertwines new media art with geological and fossil motifs to create 'digital-mineral hybrids' that explore the impact of digital culture on natural and urban environments. In an interview with Artplugged, she stated: "I visualise what our technological devices would become in say 100 million years’ time, fossilised, buried and extracted again from the earth’s stratum. I explore what ‘digital’ could look like in a physical sense using different materials and surfaces and illogical spaces to almost allow a viewer to touch digital or have a sense of disorientation as to what they were looking at."
The exhibition 'ˌai ˌai ˈai (intrinsic gestures)' features work by Adnan El-Mecky, Melle Nieling, Niels Post and Petra van Noort, Hyperweirdkids, @sm___it, Katie Hallam, and Michiel van der Zanden. By bringing together the works of these diverse artists, we see that they use technology not just as a tool but also as a medium to reflect on what it means to be human in the digital age, amid a sea of computer-generated images and artworks.
