Agnieszka Kurant - The World Through AI Jeu de Paume
The exhibition presents a selection of works created between 2016 and today, many of them previously unseen, which raise the question of how we experience the world “according to AI” or “through the prism of AI.” Specially designed for the Jeu de Paume, the exhibition reflects the fundamental distinction between “analytical AI” (which includes computer vision and facial recognition systems) and “generative AI.” Time capsules, designed as cabinets of curiosities, link the present to the past, placing current transformations in a historical perspective.
Works by Agnieszka Kurant
Alien Internet (2023)
The installation Alien Internet shows a shape-shifting life form digitally controlled in an electromagnetic field. It employs ferrofluid, a material invented by NASA in 1963 and remarkable for its capacity to change form in the presence of a magnetic field. The work refers to the fact that today the behavior and communication of millions of wild animals (whales, birds, turtles, sponges, etc.) and other non-human life forms can be captured with digital technologies around the world and analyzed through AI for various kinds of algorithmic predictions about the natural world, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis and pandemics. Non-human organisms acting collectively are thus comparable to a biological computer predicting the future. The constant ferrofluid remodeling in Alien Internet, which is fed with data collected from various scientific institutes, gives a condensed visual presence to these non-human collective intelligences.
Aggregated Ghost (2020)
The term “ghost workers” is often used to refer to the millions of clickworkers scattered across the world, mostly in the Global South, whose outsourced labor is required for the training of AI systems and for the moderation of AI-generated contents. For Aggregated Ghost, Agnieszka Kurant asked ten thousand online workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform to each send her a self-portrait. Using neural networks, she then fused these images into a “composite self-portrait”. Taking one line of pixels from each image, she produced what can be seen as a collective, crowdsourced image of this new working class. She paid the participants for their images and redistributes the profits to them whenever a copy of the artwork is sold.
Nonorganic Life 2 (2023) and Nonorganic Life 1 (2023)
The paintings in the series Nonorganic Life investigate the mixture of biological, mineral and synthetic materials that make up current computational systems. The works consist of microphotographs of complex crystalline structures resembling plants, created by mixing water glass (sodium silicate) with inorganic chemicals such as salts of metal (copper, cobalt, manganese, chromium, iron) that are essential ingredients in contemporary computers, and whose industrial extraction leads to the devastation of entire ecosystems. Nonorganic Life belongs to a series of works with which Agnieszka Kurant explores how organic and inorganic substances in the world are continually reorganized into various unstable life forms.
A.A.I. (Sytem’s Negative) No. 6 (2016)
A.A.I. (System’s Negative) is the title of a series of negative cats made from liquid zinc poured into abandoned termite mounds in the Namibian desert. Their shapes evoke both fossilized coral reefs and neural networks. It is as if these sculptures offer us a 3D model of the societies that made them possible. Each is in fact an internal portrait of a colony or system; a negative portrait of the work of the termites, the corridors and crevices collectively created by the entire colony. Each sculpture documents the way in which each termite mound of the same species develops its own collective intelligence, through different specific forms of distributed cognition. With these negative casts, Kurant invites us to conduct a comparative study of termite mounds as the fruits of a non-human collective intelligence.