Sculpture Park for the win

I had the most incredible experience attending the Company of Ideas forum at the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park on Hornby Island this past week. I had no idea this place existed but it is a 200 acre park with the most incredible views of the Salish Sea which, since the early 1970s, has been the life’s work of Rubinoff. His works are massive steel and CORE-TEN - about a hundred of them - and are meticulously placed throughout the land.

This is an annual gathering which this year took the theme of Art and AI. This was an amazing multidisciplinary group grounded in philosophy and art history. My talk touched on model collapse, multimodality, and the importance of keeping AI weird. Here are a few of the points:

• Any piece of media can be transformed into any other piece of media.

• We may have already eaten the internet. 

• It may be possible to go back and eat it again if we don’t let the AIs train themselves on themselves.

• Every AI model is imperfect and we don’t know what it would even look like if it were perfect.

• We should be wary of image-based generative AI models aspiring to be perfect especially because that often seems to mean realism to the computer scientists who are developing the models, but we can create and tap into so much more than realism.

• The aesthetics of generative AI models are unfolding within history even if it doesn’t seem like it and we don’t know how to talk about it yet. 

• Generative art production will increasingly force art history and archives to confront extreme multiples and multiplicity.

• AI is mysterious because it often uses data so large that by definition it lies beyond human understanding.

• Any information can be included in a dataset. 

• All the activity in the world is fresh human data.

• A big task ahead is to imagine alternate visions of what AI can be and do.

And there were orcas!