“AI is once again reviving questions that are not new in art”

After a successful residency and shows at Espacio 218 with the Artificial Preacher, San Martin Studio -made up of visual artists Felipe Rivas and Jaime San Martín- arrives with a new approach to the everyday and transcendental relationship we have with technology.

Using the tools of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and defunctionalization as artistic operations, “5G” will bring the public closer to a full-scale sculpture of a 5G antenna in OMA Gallery, Located in the Tobalaba Urban Market, the exhibition, accompanied by a visual dance of birds (which are not so birds), proposes a poetic, everyday and political reflection on what makes the deployment of technology possible.

In addition, the legal and institutional framework that allows the installation of 5G technology in Chile will nourish the narrative and the immersive experience in the exhibition, curated by Diego Parra. “Going through a little strangeness and entering the environment, along with installing a suspicion and reflection around the landscape, technology and beauty,” is what the artists hope to trigger in the public, invited to the opening of the exhibition this Saturday, August 17 at 12:30 p.m.

With these resources, the exhibition “installs a more political support, which is the legal discussions that took place in Chile to implement 5G”, having as a precedent that the country was the first to do so in Latin America. With this, they operate a “double siege on the concept and materiality of 5G”.

– Can you describe a history of the use of artificial intelligence in art in Chile?

Felipe Rivas (F): What happens is that these generative tools for mass use are very recent. In 2022 they appear like this, they explode, but it is true that they are technologies that have been tested experimentally and in a more limited way for a long time. The topic of AI has also been thought about theoretically in the field of science for a while. From the art, there is talk of moments of artificial intelligence. They are intensities, and now we are experiencing a wave of intensity.

Jaime San Martín (J): In Chile, I couldn’t say, but there is a history of computation in art. AI in art is cyclical, like spring – summer – autumn – winter. We are now in one of the springs. AI has allowed us to expand certain exercises that art has done by installing productive operations that point towards how language constructs certain realities or symbolisms, as conceptual art does, or instructional art, of delegating the work to another, diluting the figure of the artist. Contemporary art has asked itself a lot about the problem of language, of delegating the work to another person, or that art is the instruction itself.

– Does it only depend on the availability of tools?

F: It is related to the development of technology but it is not linear, rather it is involved with other things that are happening. The current development of massive AI technology occurred thanks to the fact that there are other elements within the ecosystem that allow something that was perhaps thought out or half-finished to be deployed.

J: It has to do with the new high-tech companies. Large capitals are linked to technology and that massiveness is what ultimately enables the massive use of AI. It is also due to the development and processing of the cloud; to the massive sale of graphic cards to perform computing at the user level. It is a question of brute force that is also used to talk about technology.

– How would you explain your use of AI in your career and in particular in this exhibition?

F: It is difficult to describe it in a single way, because there is an experimental use on the one hand, an everyday use on the other, and also a reflective use. Sometimes we understand it as a tool, other times as a dialogue with the system. We are also using artificial intelligence tools that are concrete, because there is no “one” great AI, but many different models.

I see it as a continuation of work that has been going on for some time. If we think about it more broadly from the perspective of artistic practice in general, when new media appear, artists historically use them, and of course, that opens up and generates new questions.

J: Technological development is so absurd and everyday that suddenly, when we’re working, we talk about “there will be an AI that does this, let’s see,” and it exists. It’s like someone comes up with it and it’s there. But we’re at a time when there’s not much debate about obsolescence. We’re using it for artistic purposes, but we’re doing it in exactly the same way as many people. It’s not something so special, at its core our artistic practice arises from our experience as users.

– How does this affect the user level, that the technology is so available?

F: There is a discussion in the field of media art, because, for example, there is the position of leaving the user’s plane and going to a deeper and “truer” place of knowledge that would be programming, or expert knowledge. If that were the logic, the MIT engineers would be the only ones who could have a position on the matter and not the artists or anyone else. We prefer to claim that place of the user, from which one can also give an opinion.

J: I find it very interesting this question of how when the masses have come to occupy or inhabit the media, these media are liberated. A bit like what happened with the paint bottle and the impressionists, which allowed painters to leave the studio and paint in the middle of nature, or when Nikon started selling cameras.in a massive way, the most uprooted photo of painting or theater appears.

– Creating with AI, does it merit an ethical question?

J: I think so, it does, but it does merit directing that question, that is: who benefits from this typical discussion about the ethics of AI that installs and naturalizes concepts such as private property, the use of images, genius or originality? Disney’s law firms benefit more than art, anyway. In the end, the market and the cultural industries are sustained and profit from these conservative values ​​that have nothing to do with the diverse history of the forms of production in the arts.

F: The whole history of art is a “productive theft” as Professor Guillermo Machuca said at the School of Arts in Chile. One produces based on what one has learned, copying paintings by famous authors, or I don’t know, collage for example, which is taking fragments of things that already exist and putting together something new with them. When photography appeared, it generated a whole debate about to what extent the image taken by a machine is art or is there authorship when the photographer only pressed a button. So AI is once again raising questions that are not new in art. But of course, it challenges a very sensitive part of a human capacity that seemed very essential and special to humanity, which is the idea of ​​intelligence. There is an appeal to the human ego in that sense.

– The work will literally place a life-size 5G antenna in the exhibition space. Why the choice of proximity?

F: The viewer will encounter an immersive installation where it seems that he is in a kind of heaven inhabited by this technological object. This is to return to the initial moment of the project, which arises from a -in quotation marks- aesthetic fascination with the antenna object at sunset, its lights, and the contrast; something that perhaps not everyone would find beautiful at first. Finding the moment of that antenna at sunset beautiful is a proposition that is bothersome: showing it and problematizing the relationship of that distance with that proximity to others.

J: In fact, we have never experienced a real-size antenna. For us, it is also that thing that we always see from afar, but which has a very material charge.I think that there can be that slight strangeness of entering an environment, of installing a certain suspicion or reflection around the landscape, beauty and technology. That is what would be most interesting if it happened.

In the background of the antenna there will be a mass of birds that you cannot see but they are polygons. You can see the birds from a distance, they move like birds, but when you get closer they are like little paper airplanes, they are like triangles that move. They are sensitive reading layers. I think it would be fun if people could get into that game.

– Another element of the sample is information from official texts, why?

J: We wanted to bring to life with this antenna files that would account for the legal basis, for the discussions that have taken place to implement the network. It is a double siege to the concept of 5G: one is the technological objects like the antenna and the other is the legal materiality.

F: 5G technology is always thought of as an immaterial thing, but in reality it is material, it is electronic, it has a technological support such as the antenna infrastructure, but it also has another support that interests us that is more political, which is all the legal discussions that took place in Chile so that it could be implemented.

– Chile has implemented technology under a neoliberal regime. What does this country’s relationship with technological development tell us?

J: We have learned a lot about this along the way. For example, last year Chile was the country with the fastest internet in the world, literally; and this year we are in third place, surpassed only by Singapore and Hong Kong. There is something about Chile’s technological development and its positioning in global markets that has to do with a kind of pretension, a kind of strange developmentalism. There is a parenthesis that would be, for example, the Synco project at the UP that is running in another beta, in an idea of ​​an integral and integrative development.

F: It could be defined as a pathology, that the function of technology and new technologies compensates for other deficiencies within the country’s project, deficiencies in the democratic and social order.