A couple of posts back I blogged that a work, “Out of Order 3,” was accepted for the SAQA “AI: Artistic Interpretations” call for entries.
The rapid appearance, acceptance and desirability, indeed the allure of Artificial Intelligence is phenomenal, as is the amount of energy needing to be drawn by computers to use it. I’m not sure if this aspect will be touched on by any of the selected artists, but we’ll all have to wait until the exhibition opens in Baton Rouge LA in February next year to see all the works and their statements.
The prospectus for this SAQA Global Exhibition read, in part: AI: Artistic Interpretations unites the creativity of fiber artists from across the globe with the algorithms, data, and machine learning of Artificial Intelligence. This exhibition will showcase the boundless creativity that emerges when human artistry combines with the potential of technology. Use artificial intelligence as a tool in your artwork or express your response to it. Combining artistry and technology developed from human inputs, AI: Artistic Interpretations encourages artists to explore what they can make when blending AI generated material with their own creative styles, resulting in works of art inspired by, or responding to, artificial intelligence and digital media. Wall-hung, ceiling-hung, and 3D artwork are all acceptable.” Thus, artists had a fairly wide range of angles from which to approach this interesting topic in rendering their ideas in fabric and thread.
My own approach was to enter a work on which the grid of gold printed squares was clearly impacted by some major disruptive force, echoing the early computer generative artist Vera Molnar’s designs. In her algorithm she’d inserted a small amount of code that made the plotter print increasingly out of kilter linear squares, and by these generative designs she’s known as one of the pioneering artists of the 60s to use the computer as a tool in her art. One artist who announced her acceptance into this exhibition told how she’d used a program to insert heself into some well known digital meme (which my cultural gap re US media didn’t allow me to recognise) and I’m sure there will be some artists who gave AI an assignment to design something for them from some provided data. Each angle is a valid one to meet the entry criteria – as long as you see AI as just another tool which can be used various ways.
It was interesting therefore that on a related art quilt site in the last few days, there was a fairly heated discussion about one of Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry’s recent works, with the whirling shapes and bright colours that characterise her designs. I can’t find that discussion now, but there was a considerable number of people who felt that by using her computer to design the work, then sending that file off to a fabric printing company to print onto fabric and return it for her to then layer up and do her incredible machine quilting on, was all in some way ‘cheating’. Caryl has always been an absolute whizz at piecing, and her lessons in that are now freely available on line. She could have pieced the work, but chose to go the whole-cloth quilt route, for whatever reason, and the quilting was superb as ever. That discussion reminded me of a woman I met in the Arapahoe County Quilt guild I joined as a P&Q newbie in1988. Trudy Hughes’ methods of rotary cutting and machine piecing had revolutionised the craft of patchwork in the previous few years, and this woman commented with a slight sniff in her voice, that she always used her scissors to cut out the patches, and only hand stitched the shapes together. I don’t think she used the word ‘cheating’, but that is clearly what she thought.