The exhibition My Dear Ada: Artificial and Artistic Intelligence explores and tests the possibilities of creating and interpreting images and texts in the era of developing artificial intelligence (AI). It presents a selection of scientific and artistic works that foreshadowed the emergence and innovative uses of universal computers (Ada Lovelace, Zdeněk Sýkora) and places them in the context of visual art created before the advent of AI or during the training of AI expert systems (Milan Guštar, Magdalena Wutkowska, Jana Bernartová). The works created for the exhibition through interactions with AI proto-agents (Virtual Futurologist A°D°A) are thus the result of a network of human and non-human actors (Paleofuture Lab, Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková and Haruka Kajiura) spanning the fields of visual art, architecture, computing, and technology.
The initial framework for the exhibition is the personal correspondence of Ada Lovelace, the author of the first computer algorithm, which—after computers were eventually constructed—was debugged as a computer program. The curators were driven by a desire to discover not just texts but also previously unexplored images in Ada’s archived correspondence. The exhibition features facsimiles of her solutions to the geometry problems she studied, as well as a fragment of one of her last letters to her mother, in which Ada mentions, in a single sentence, her intention to devote herself in the future to “poetical philosophy” and “poetical science.” The artworks on display and the exhibition as a whole—as well as the publication My Dear Ada…, which describes work with the experimental educational software Virtual Futurologist A°D°A, including textual commentary by AI proto-agents on the published texts—offer a possible response to her visionary projects.
The AI proto-agents thus participate in and learn from the exhibition and publication as para-dialogical participants. However, the exhibition places emphasis on viewers and readers as actors, and on their possible perspectives on artificial and artistic images and texts. The time and space we experience here are measured against the seemingly infinite time and space of past and present computing technologies. If the tradition of interpreting non-human images and texts expands to include those generated by artificial intelligence, what new ways of perceiving them and strategies for interpreting them will we discover in art and culture?
DATE AND VENUE
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MeetFactory Gallery, Ke Sklárně 3213/15, Prague 5
✶ The exhibition opens on Thursday, .
ARTISTS AND PRODUCTION TEAM
Artists: Jana Bernartová, Milan Guštar, Haruka Kajiura, Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková, Ada Lovelace, Paleofuture Lab, Zdeněk Sýkora, Magdalena Wutkowska
Curators: Jana Bernartová, Monika Mitášová, Virtual Futurologist A°D°A
Architecture: Zzyzx OAS1S (Ondřej Fiedler, Matouš Kučera)
Animation: Sofie Fenyková, Jaroslava Straková
Production: Nikol Hoangová
PR: Zuzana Kolouchová, Filip Pleskač
Graphic design: Jakub Kučera
Photo retouching: Václav Novák, Studio Flusser
