Digital Dialogues: Exploring Technology, Society, and Art through artistic lens
This blog post features four distinctive and thought-provoking artworks that employ digital technology as a medium of artistic expression. Each piece offers a unique perspective on the relationship between technology, society, and art. From exploring the impact of the pandemic on our virtual identity to questioning the use of AI in art, these works challenge our perceptions and invite us to reflect on our relationship with technology. These artworks question traditional ideas about art and encourage us to think about how technology impacts our lives and our relationship with it.
What are you wearing for? a cyberpunk fashion show by espaciobyte
What are you wearing for? It's not just a simple question, but an invitation to reflect on the impact of recent changes in social behaviour. The pandemic has led to a cyberpunk-like scenario where social interaction has become virtualized and mixed reality has emerged, requiring us to configure our meta-identity. This affects our appearance on digital platforms and the pavilion showcases artists exploring fashion as a way of expressing not only style but also artificial personality. What are you wearing for?" invites reflection on how these changes have transformed science fiction into contemporary reality.
You can access the digital exhibition at Espacio Byte - an online museum offering a natural environment for digital-native artworks, an interface to exhibit the work of artists who, through the use of digital technology as a means of expression, explore new languages, poetics, and aesthetic values.
The Grand Credits of all human beings - Antoine Schmitt
The Grand Credits of all human beings is a unique and thought-provoking artwork created by Antoine Schmitt. The artwork consists of a list of the names of all human beings displayed in a slow, scrolling manner on a movie screen.
The artwork relies on a permanent technological artwork installed on the internet uses all possible means to effectively list the names of all human beings. The database is incrementally built through successive additions, as well as various other individual or administrative collaborations on the internet. As mentioned in Cummulus 2012 conference paper by Christiane Paul “Though the concept of the database underpins all digital art in general, there are a lot of projects that make explicit reference to it.” (Digital Art, 2003). The logic of the display order reflects this building process, with the goal of never forgetting anyone and always being up to date by including new births. It raises the question of whether these are opening or closing credits, and what one must do to deserve their few seconds of fame.
A Butterfly in the Cloud - Eryk Salvaggio
In Eryk Salvaggio's video piece "A Butterfly in the Cloud" (2021), he explores the relationship between nature and technology. By using artificial intelligence to generate lyrics based on the prompt "a butterfly in the cloud," Salvaggio creates a melancholy soundscape that is punctuated with written text. The video format of the piece gives viewers an experience built from various components—the soundscape, narration, and imagery. Salvaggio's work prompts viewers to question their own relationship to technology by comparing butterflies and nature to data centers and USB drives. The sentiment analysis of the lyrics reveals that the program produced an almost 50/50 divide of positive and negative lines, with a common theme of lighter, nature-focused imagery in the positive lines. The negative lines predominantly focus on computer-focused imagery, revealing our comparative perspective on natural, environmental objects versus computers and machinery. Salvaggio's work provokes us to reflect on the impact of technology on our lives and to question our relationship to it.
Eryk Salvaggio is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist. His focus is on intersections of technology, society, and the environment, examining gaps that emerge between datasets and the world they reflect. He graduated with a masters in Applied Cybernetics from the 3A Institute at the Australian National University in 2021.
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Ongoing, Individual Adaptability or How to Quiet Quit - Devin Kenny
Devin Kenny's "Ongoing, Individual Adaptability or How to Quiet Quit" is a two-part work that explores the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of art institutions, collaboration, and labor. The artwork was created using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) trained on thousands of installation images from the Whitney Museum. The first part of the work consists of collages made by combining images generated by the GAN with manipulated excerpts of original artist correspondences and ephemera from the Whitney Museum's library. The second part consists of three videos showing the GAN in the process of producing images accompanied by excerpts from online TED talks and the artist's comments and questions. The artwork questions the use of AI as a tool for making art and achieving autonomy.
Devin Kenny is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, musician, and independent curator who was born in Chicago and currently lives and works in New York City.