Launch Exhibition：The Book of Sand

Organised by:  Aiiiii Art Center

Cooperation Partner: Art & Artificial Intelligence Lab, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University

Dates: 30th October 2021-11 April 2022

Opening: 29th October 2021

Artists: Certain Measures, Sofia Crespo，Dabeiyuzhou, Jake Elwes,  Entangled Others,  Obvious, Yuqian Sun

Academic Hosts: 

Filippo Fabrocini, Kostas Terzidis

Executive Curator: Xi Li

Address: 800 Chunxi Road, Minhang District, Shanghai

Art & Artificial Intelligence Lab, Tongji University College of Design and Innovation and Aiiiii Art Center Center are pleased to present the exhibition "The Book of Sand", opening on October 30, 2021. The exhibition will feature works from Certain Measures, Dabeiyuzhou, Entangled Others, Jake Elwes, Obvious, Sofia Crespo, and Yuqian Sun. The exhibition will run until April 11, 2022. 

“Lines consist of an infinite number of points; planes an infinite number of lines; volumes an infinite number of planes, hypervolumes an infinite number of volumes... No, this, this more geometrico, is definitely not the best way to begin my tale.”

“The picture of an infinite line came to me, and I drew it: the line went on forever, right up to the edge of the universe. That is how the universe was born.”

The two sentences above are a way to begin our tale, as well as an “imitation game” that might eventually displace personal intellectual enjoyment — we presuppose that the text has been written by a human, but in fact, the first sentence is extracted from “The Book of Sand” written by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in 1975, whereas the second was generated today by a GPT-2 language model based on the first sentence. In 1950, Alan Turing, who is widely considered to be the father of artificial intelligence, proposed the "imitation game" (i.e., the famous Turing test) in his groundbreaking paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Turing asserted that within 50 years we would be able to program a computer with up to a billion bits of information, mimicking human behavior so accurately that after multiple five-minute testing sessions, more than thirty percent of human interrogators would be unsure whether they were talking to a human or a machine. The machine would then be recognized to have passed the Turing Test and therefore be considered to have an intelligence comparable to that of humans. Today, as we get closer to realizing Turing’s assertion, the question that Turing alluded to in 1950 resonates again: “Can machines think”?

...between 0 and 1 lies an infinite number of values, images a finite number of pixels... No, this concept of machine language is definitely not the best way to begin the tale.

Certain Measures

As the lines blur between human and machine intelligence, a fertile creative space opens where digital forces contend with perceptual and physical space. Certain Measures is a creative collective that imagines futures shaped by these multivalent and turbulent issues. Founded by Andrew Witt and Tobias Nolte, Certain Measures draws omnivorously on a diverse range of visual techniques, scientific ideas, and fabricated assemblages to build in the space between human and machine, nature and technology. Using bespoke software, machine intelligence, and intricate geometries as their media, their creative investigations take the form of architectural and sculptural installations, video and immersive experiences, and diverse provocations that imagine the digital processing of physical reality.

Sofia Crespo

Sofia Crespo is an artist working with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object.

Crespo looks at the similarities between techniques of AI image formation, and the way that humans express themselves creatively and cognitively recognize their world. Her work brings into question the potential of AI in artistic practice and its ability to reshape our understandings of creativity. On the other side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques.

大悲宇宙

Dabeiyuzhou (LIN Kunhao, b. 1990, Fujian Province, China) is widely recognized for the exquisite and transcendent virtual worlds featured in his works. His recent works construct databases via open-source intelligence, employing program algorithm to create ever-changing information complexes.

Dabeiyuzhou explores the interaction between human consciousness and cutting-edge technology, establishing a system of human-machine synergy to process information through data collection, algorithm generation, and artists’ intervention. In his works, algorithms blend natural and virtual reality, summoning future possibilities into the present time and space.

Dabeiyuzhou first encountered 3D art in Next-Gen gameplay in 2010, which had inspired his early digital 3D series “For Future” (2015). He subsequently explored and integrated generative adversarial networks (GANs) into his ongoing project “Virtual Butterfly”, which  had began in 2019. His other works include “Gibberish Poems” (2017) and “Text Gene Project” (2019), with the latter having constructed a vast text database through a unique codification method.

His works has been shown in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Xiamen through exhibitions hosted by Power Station of Art and MODERN SKY, he has also collaborated with leading fashion brands such as NIKE and Burberry.

Entangled Others

Entanglement is a complex state one where no single entity can be said to be separate, or somehow unaffected, by any other present entangled, we cannot consider ourselves without others, act without interacting, speak without being heard.

It is a multitude of you, and others, equally present and alive, together.The rich substrate of the uncanny, eerie spaces between us and the non-human world cannot remain as an aesthetic space, our world cannot bear this self-imposed distance and denial of our inter-twined state of us and others.

Becoming Entangled Others is about moving further into an entanglement with the more-than-human world of us & others. A world where diversity and inter-connectedness are nurtured and engaged.

Jake Elwes

Jake Elwes is a media artist living and working in London. He studied at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2013-17). Recent works explore his research into machine learning and artificial intelligence. His practice looks for poetry and narrative in the success and failures of these systems, while also investigating and questioning the code and ethics behind them. His current works in the Zizi Project explore AI bias by queering datasets with drag performers. They simultaneously demystify and subvert AI systems. 

Jake's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; TANK Museum, Shanghai; Today Art Museum, Beijing; CyFest, Venice; Edinburgh Futures Institute, UK; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany; New Contemporaries 2017, UK; Ars Electronica 2017, Austria; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; LABoral Centro, Spain; Nature Morte, Delhi, India; RMIT Gallery, Australia; Centre for the Future of Intelligence, UK and he has been featured on ZDF & BBC.

Obvious

Obvious is a collective of researchers, artists, and friends, working with the latest models of deep learning to explore the creative potential of artificial intelligence. They are behind the sale of the first AI artwork to go through a major auction house. They use their work to share their vision of artificial intelligence and its implementation in our society.

孙羽茜

Yuqian Sun is a computational artist who graduated from Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, and Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently a doctoral student at Royal College of Art. She is also one of the Baidu PaddlePaddle Developers Experts (PPDE).

Sun’s creative works are actuated by the curiosity over the conversations between humans and virtual beings in the video games. Her art projects center on AI chatbots in exploring the narrative and intimate relationship in human-AI interaction. 

Her works and researches have been presented at galleries and conferences including ALIFE 2020 (The 2020 Conference on Artificial Life), Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center Media Façade, 2021 Asia Digital Art Exhibition, 7th ACM Celebration of Women in Computing, and Spring 2021 Poly Auctions, Beijing.

Kostas Terzidis

PhD, Professor, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University

Kostas Terzidis is professor at D&I at Tongji University and director of the ShangXiang Lab. He was previously associate professor at Harvard University GSD (2003-2011) and assistant professor at the UCLA (1995-2003). He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, Masters from OSU, and diploma from Aristotle University. His research is automated design and AI. He is author of numerous academic papers and the sole author of four books: Permutation Design (Routledge: 2014), Algorithms for Visual Design (Wiley: 2009), Algorithmic Architecture (Architectural Press: 2006), and Expressive Form (Spon:2003). Between 2011-2017 he created and ran a startup called Organic Parking, Inc.

Filippo Fabrocini

PhD, Professor, College of Design & Innovation, Tongji University Prof. 

Filippo Fabrocini is Professor in the College of Design & Innovation and Director of the “Sustainable AI Lab”. His main areas of interest are Machine Learning and Ethical AI. Previously he has been Senior Researcher at IBM Research (Rome, Italy/San Jose, USA), Visiting Researcher in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA), Professor in the Dep. of Philosophy at Gregorian University, and General Manager of the IBM Milan/Rome Business Innovation Center (IBM BIC). Prof. Fabrocini has won multiple awards including two IBM Outstanding Technology Awards. He is the author of more than 30 papers and three books.

Aiiiii Art Center (Est. 2021) is an artificial intelligence art institution based in Shanghai. The organisation seeks to support, promote, as well as incubate both international and domestic artists and projects related to intelligent algorithms. Aiiiii Art Center is committed to becoming a pioneer of artificial intelligence through the discovering of exciting possibilities afforded by the intersections of creativity and technology. 

Aiiiii Art Center aims to offer insight into the many challenges, practices, and creative modes of artificial intelligence based art. Such aims will be achieved through academic conferences and published research efforts conducted either independently or in collaboration with domestic and international institutions and organisations. This organisation will also actively promote and showcase the exploratory uses of artificial intelligence based art in practice. 

Address: 800 Chunxi Road, Minhang District, Shanghai

Contact: info@aiiiii.com 

euphypress@aiiiii.com 

The Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab (Est. 2021) is an affiliation of Tongji University’s College of Design and Innovation. The Lab is committed to conducting research within a broad range of where the arts meets artificial intelligence (AI) based technologies. The aim is to establish and discover possibilities of innovative advanced technologies in the domain of creative practice. The Lab is an expanding platform currently supported by a number of artists, scientists, and technicians working towards a joint effort of accelerating advancement in relevant fields of industry, research and education.