Recoding Art

The film results from a survey conducted by Brazilian artist Bruno Moreschi and digital media researcher Gabriel Pereira on the interaction between artificial intelligence systems and contemporary art. The footage leads the viewer into the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. In the museum’s rooms, a mechanical voice named Lisa “reads”; or, more precisely, interprets a sculpture by André Cadere as a lamp based on algorithms; a bronze by Juan Muñoz as a medical image; an installation by Jannis Kounellis as cats. This interpretation is entrusted to seven different types of artificial intelligence, usually used for the recognition of commercial images. Among the findings, Moreschi and Pereira looked for glitches, errors and unexpected readings by the AI to understand if these could be a new way of interpreting art. In the last part of the film, the authors also discuss the role of the people who work on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, a service which, by exploiting precarious employment, helps produce answers that AI is yet unable to provide.