On display in the Betty and Art Robins Group Gallery
September 5 - October 19
Exhibition dates: September 5 - October 19, 2023
Reception: September 8, 6 - 8 pm (free and open to the public)
In a new exciting take on our Interpretations Show, artists selected randomly generated titles for their artwork from an AI (Artificial Intelligence) Artwork Title Generator. Artists will then interpret and transform that title into their own unique artwork. Personalities and the inner workings of artists' minds will be on full display on our gallery walls.
OK, Computer is a juried show open to all artists 16+ years old, all media welcome.
Thank you to juror Matthew Ballou for the careful consideration when curating this show. Scroll to see his juror’s statement.
Congratulations to all ribbon winners!
1st place
Michelle Marcum, Hallucinogenic scene with glowing metamorphosis
Juror’s statement on this piece: Michelle Marcum incorporates natively digital techniques into very physical craft and presentation in this work. Every aspect of the piece is considered and integrated. The strong sense of design, brilliant coherence of color, and beautiful variation of materials come together to demonstrate the quintessential difference between something AI-generated and something human-made: the algorithm couldn’t make this work. Only a human being with experience, knowledge, and intelligence could coordinate it all. That, and the piece feels like a celebration!
2nd place
Lindsay Borges, Pristine Spoils
Juror’s statement on this piece: Lindsay Borges’s sculpture is a simulacrum of McDonald’s nuggets. It forms a humorous tableau focusing on the question of what is real and what is represented. We laugh but also know the golden nuggets in the art might be just about as real as the ones we snag at the drive-thru.
3rd place
Pam Gainor, Singular Maelstrom
Juror’s statement on this piece: Pam Gainor’s work combines painting and collage, and shows her willingness to break out of previous tendencies to explore fresh iconographic and symbolic pathways.
Honorable Mentions
Veronica Runge, The Transcendental Movement
Juror Statement
Humans have an insatiable desire for things to appear. We want entertainment, resources, and tools to just be. We want fast food and fast fashion. We don’t want to see “how the sausage is made”. But shepherding ideas, translating experiences, and striving for evocative artifacts require more than style. They must be more than a surface appearance of history, investigation, and investment of time; they must actually involve those things.
People want easily digestible aesthetics. Inexperienced students in the arts often strive to achieve the appearance of style. They want the context of style without paying an investment of hard work. But form is never neutral, and how one arrives at a form is every bit as important as what the form appears to be at first glance. Without a robust background of intentional effort, an artwork can never embody the substance of meaning, only mimic the suggestion of it.
The issue with AI-generated imagery and words is that they depict only the appearance of the process and the intimation of aesthetic choices. On its own, an AI work lacks the depth those formal qualities indicate. For those qualities to exist there must be genuine human intervention, a true human inflection.
That’s the problem with AI. Not that it exists; it can be a good tool. Instead, the problem is in believing that AI can be an end in itself. AI-generated images and words use billions upon billions of hours of human effort as raw material, then divorce those activities, investigations, and experiments, from their original intent. They produce the appearance of meaning, but without the true power that comes from an aesthetic structure functioning as proof of human life and engagement. AI allows people to instantly achieve something that looks like an artifact of human experience without having to deal with the messy reality that true experience entails. Algorithmically collating styles and subjects already invented by humans is not enough. Subjective human sensation is essential for the kind of communication that art offers.
Human inventiveness and physical engagement taking precedence over auto-generated words is what I am seeing in this show. I see the subjectivity and touch of the artists coming through. Though inspired by AI-generated titles, these works move beyond the affectation of style and display real investigation. The AI phrases take on specific meanings BECAUSE they have been filtered through a unique human mind. That human aspect is reasserted by the physical reality of the works.
