The art technology team at London’s Serpentine Galleries has invited artists and arts organisations, lawyers, publishers and technologists to join them in developing new shared systems for cultural institutions to manage and control their data using artificial intelligence (AI). The call to action comes in a year where the use of AI by large companies to analyze and profit from data sets — as well as by governments, businesses, professionals and creatives in their daily lives — is one of the major issues facing society.
The group was invited at the Future Art Ecosystems 4: Art x Public AI (Fae 4) presentation in London. their fourth annual report designed to encourage new thinking and collaboration around the interaction between art and technology. There have been previous reports Art x Advanced Technologies (2020), Art x Metaverse (2021), Art x Decentralized Technology (2022). The Fae report is designed to “collect, share and build knowledge about technology and society,” Kay Watson, head of arts technology at the Serpentine, said at the report’s launch on March 19.
The reports, Watson said, are “on the rise in emerging AI technologies and how they impact the creative economy and society.” In addition, it “provides insights and strategies for the cultural sector to understand the impact of AI on everyday life,” said Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist.
“AI technologies promise to impact almost every aspect of our lives,” the report says. “Knowing that this transformation will take place on a societal scale” requires the development of mechanisms that allow multiple voices to focus on “AI not just as a new category of technological products, but as a public resource and infrastructure.” This development, the report says, will create an understanding of so-called “public AI” and how organizations, artists and professionals can participate for the public good.
Kay Watson (left, Serpentine Head of Art Technologies), Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Director), Victoria Ivanova, Eva Jaeger and Alasdair Milne at the launch of the report Photo: Sam Nightingale
Serpentine has focused on AI and how it relates to art and artists since 2014. This interest was formalized in 2019 with the creation of the Serpentine’s Creative AI Lab, in collaboration with King’s College London’s Digital Humanities department and the Legal Lab. research program at the Serpentine.
AI has a “key dimension” to the Serpentine’s exhibition program this year, Obrist said at the launch of the report.
Refik Anadol’s exhibition at Serpentine North (until 7 April) has its UK premiere Living Archive: NatureCommission presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January Anadol describes it as a “pioneering initiative we call the Big Nature Model…the world’s first open-source, nature-focused, creative multimodal AI, trained on a large and ethical nature dataset.”
On the other hand, in autumn and winter the Berlin-based artists and technologists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst – longtime collaborators with the Serpentine group – will present an exhibition using the Serpentine created from the building and a set of voice data collected along with the work. UK community choirs.
Data trusts and data trustees
The collaboration with Herndon and Dryhurst will test one of the report’s recommendations: that cultural institutions should experiment with creating what they call “data trusts”—a means of preserving data, in this case recordings shared by community choirs—and implementing a mission. Of a “trustee of the data”. The Serpentine is for collaboration with Herndon and Dryhurst.
The report’s authors hope to capture the public’s engagement with AI by using something publicly available (such as recordings of community choirs) to illustrate how easy it is to trust the data.
No organization can do it alone
Another recommendation is for organizations to realize that they cannot fully understand their relationship with AI. “We need common references around data management in an emerging data market,” said Eva Jaeger, curator of art technologies and head of the creative AI Serpentine, at the launch of the report. That requires multiple organizations to “come together and understand what the policies are,” he said. It also requires institutions to develop “forward production capacity”, which depends on having “technological literacy that enables organizations to make decisions”.
This technological literacy “is not yet integrated into the cultural sector”, adds Jaeger, and is one of its main focuses. Fae4 It’s a guide to the multi-layered technology stack that makes up AI. The report says that this stack, divided into software and hardware sections, shows how “the interdependence between industry, states, non-governmental organizations, academia and the many publics involved in the creation and adoption of AI” can be understood. This, he says, highlights that “‘public AI’ is not just a speculative category, but a reality that requires continuous development and support”.
Above all, “we want people to read the report,” Jaeger said.
- Refik Anadol: Echoes of the Earth: A living archive Serpentine North Gallery, London (until April 7)
- Future Art Ecosystems 4: Art x Public AI
