2023-10-18 08:33:00
Are not monkeys with guns, but rather friendly robotic apes armed with typewriters, the first thing one sees on the posters and banners of the overwhelming exhibition on artificial intelligence that has just landed at the Center de Cultura Contemporànea de Barcelona (CCCB). For the case, however, it is the same. Monkeys and guns. Humans and machines. Because we are the ape and artificial intelligence is the keyboard. Or was it the other way around? “Artificial intelligence is a game of mirrors, it constantly returns our image to us,” slips Lluís Nacenta, curator of the Barcelona version of an exhibition that he started filming in 2019 at the Barbican Centre Londoner. “Where are the borders and what dialogue can be established?”, asks Jordi Costa, director of exhibitions at the CCCB, in turn.
The answer, if there is one, must be sought in rooms full of screens and stimuli, algorithms and data, but also historical roots, mathematical ingenuity and looping questions. «Everything is repeating», that announces, joker, Baltasar Gracian In the first installation of the exhibition, a mantra of synthetic voices that reproduces in a ‘loop’ the fears and epiphanies associated with artificial intelligence. From there, expository overflow and theoretical ‘big bang’. Of Ramon Llull to Alan Turing. From the Japanese kami spirits to the golem of Judaism. From facial identification systems to robotic toys to treat autism. From data gasoline to fragments of ‘Her’ and ‘Ex Machina’.
A detail of the EFE exhibition
The idea, says Luke Kemp, co-director of the Barbican’s immersive branch, is to show “man’s fascination with creating an intelligence beyond the human.” And there, of course, the penultimate automatic counting system of people in real time fits as well as a reproduction of Charles Babbage’s analytical machine.
Thus, with science fiction converted into pure and simple realism, into labor conflict and universal everyday life, ‘AI: Artificial Intelligence’ balances the balance of risks and benefits, fears and miracles, to make visible questions that are often unanswered. «Is artificial intelligence racist? Will it destroy us? Will it end the work of artists? “Does a machine that knows how to speak correctly really not know what it is saying?” Nacenta illustrates. Does Artificial Intelligence dream of mechanical apes and electric humans? Anyone passing by will ask.
New Renaissance
«The magnitude of the phenomenon is such that it has come to speak of fourth industrial revolution and even a new Renaissance, thanks to the increase in cognitive abilities that would place us before a key moment in the history of human evolution,” underlines the director of the CCCB, Judit Carrera, to present an exhibition designed in collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center which brings together ethical dilemmas, technological incantations and interactive installations. The most amazing, almost at the end, allows us to recompose and smell the fragrance of a flower that became extinct in 1912. At her side, the synthesized voice of Maria Arnal harmonizes, using an algorithm, what the visitor sings and generates a soundtrack in which it is human has as much weight as the digital.
Robert del Naja (Massive Attack), Kode 9, Jake Elwes and Eduard Escofet, among others, are some of the artists who shed light on the most creative part of artificial intelligences and educate them to recreate rhythmic patterns or dialogue with piano melodies . «In reality, artificial intelligence is not so artificial either –says Carrera-. “It was born in the mid-1950s, but there has been a coexistence between human and non-human intelligences for centuries.”
A visitor interacts with the dog Aigo EFE
It is thus understood that the exhibition covers alchemy and ‘ars combinatoria’; Ada Lovelace’s writings on the calculus of the nervous system and a replica of the machine Enigma which was used in the Benedict Cumberbatch film; algorithms and geometric problems from 17th century Japan with the latest advances in bioprinting. The history and prehistory of AI, summarized in a chronology with milestones as disparate as Bolzano’s theory of science, the first Japanese assistant robots, ‘Star Wars’, Octavia Butler’s novels, Kasparov’s defeat of ‘ hands’ of Deep Blue and the nice movements of Aigo, a robot dog that learns as it goes. “Artificial intelligence has had an unexpected infiltration into private life,” highlights Jordi Costa.
Before that, flashes of ‘Black Mirror’: a dancer teaching a network of synthetic nodes to move; a screen that turns one into a kind of accumulation of mechanical prostheses; a facial fingerprint detection tool; therapeutic robots who interact with sick children; campaigns against the creation of autonomous weapons; shogi boards and (artificial) world champions of Go… “In reality, intelligence is not artificial, but the mirror of human aspirations, potentialities and defects,” Carrera emphasizes. “In the end, the questions that arise have to do with us,” concludes Nacenta.
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