WHAT happens when an image leaves an archive and enters the feedback loops of an artificial neural network?
Beginning with this speculation, Five Arts Centre's 'Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence' by Singapore-based artist Ho Rui An travels back in time in an exciting lecture performance in Kuala Lumpur.
And a world premiere before its showing at the Centre Pompidou in Paris later this year.
It obviously showcases the revolutionary potential of art.
In a recent interview, Ho says: "The performance seeks to understand the politics and ethics of artificial intelligence by considering the current generative AI boom historically, going back in time to the early years of the Cold War when the first experiments into artificial neural networks were being conducted.
"AI-generated images appear original, but they are in fact the reconstituted fragments of existing images – indeed they appear original only because their origins are obscured through the generative process.
"I'm trying to understand what's happening in this 'forgetting' of origins, which is also a forgetting of history," he says.
Ho, an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory, has presented projects at the Shanghai Biennale, Bangkok Art Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Jakarta Biennale, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Kunsthalle Wien, Singapore Art Museum, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and Yamaguchi Centre for Arts and Media in Japan.
"As an artist, I got my start in the visual arts, working mostly with moving images. At the same time, I was also doing a lot of writing within the field.
"At some point, as I did more oral presentations of my texts, I realised they could be combined with my moving image practice to become a performance in the form of a lecture with moving images, or you might say, a kind of live cinema.
"That's when I began moving into performance and presenting work in a more theatrical context," he says.
Ho's 70-minute lecture performance reflects on what it means for the different historical figurations to make up the grounds of "intelligence" that underpin today's generative AI models.
These models draw upon "memory" not for the narration of history but for the endless generation and regeneration of target distributions of noise.
He says he would like the audience to take a more critical approach towards AI.
"I want them to feel more empowered as agents driving the current generative AI boom rather than to be just passive users of technology."
Well, be there or be square!
Catch 'Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence' from July 14-15 at 8.30pm at the Five Arts Centre studio on the 9th Floor in GMBB, Jalan Robertson, Bukit Bintang, KL.
Tickets, priced at RM60 and RM30 (students/disabled/senior citizens), can be purchased at www.cloudjoi.com.