The Future Will Be of Art: Exploring the Intersection of Art and Technology

[”Será del arte el futuro” puede gratis en formato digital en Bajalibros clickeando acá]

Art is the subject that calls me like no other on this planet. After writing a first book dedicated to the contemporary Argentine scene and a second book that thinks about the brilliant figure of Leonardo da Vinci from the present – together with my colleague Héctor Pavón – I decided that my third book, The future will be of art, should be about art and technology.

Because? because the idea was to think about the future, and what better tool than the visual arts to glimpse what is coming, to peek a little into what is sometimes uncertain. So I investigated a series of wonderful and ambitious projects that, it seemed to me, described very well what I wanted to tell, and that have an unusual validity.

In China, for example, they presented a mega sculpture of changing images made with the information obtained from a satellite that spent nine years in space searching for habitable planets, the work of the Turkish artist collective Ouchhh with the help of the NASA astronomer Dawn Gelino, who has been investigating the possibility of life on other planets for years. Her Ted talk available online is not to be missed.

Da Vinci, an inspiration for the author and a believer that art creates the future. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

The app launched by Rob Anders under the name Niio allows you to watch works of video art as if you were watching any of those popular movie and series streaming platforms. The museum of the Japanese collective Teamlab knew how to combine Japanese philosophy with the most hypnotic interactive and immersive images. A 10,000 square meter museum, completely digital, with works produced by five hundred computers that project natural landscapes that change with each season. All of them provided their testimony for this book.

But the most fun part of the project came when it occurred to me to train an Artificial Intelligence to write in my style, just as I do. For that I had to look for help and the Mendoza technology specialist Esteban Tablón appeared, who mixed magic and expertise and developed a program to train an AI to refer to my usual topic, even following my style.

The program was developed in 2019 applying semantic network techniques and natural language processing. We then did a project that had never been done before in Spanish. And with the passing of the versions and the learning process, it was inevitable to refer to this incipient AI as “she” so we baptized it with the name of Lucía Funes, La Maga Memoriosa, a tribute to two inescapable people such as Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges.

But we also assigned a specific topic: “art and the future.” Finally, in January 2020, we launched that atypical, unpublished book, where we anticipated by at least three years what would be Chat GPT4, released to the public in November 2022, which is capable of emulating anyone in the same style.

Magritte – The betrayal of images (1928-1929)

The beautiful thing about the experience is that I asked the AI ​​to talk to me about art in the future and she, candidly, responded that the future belongs to art, and that’s how that book was titled with a phrase that she had thrown out. AI itself: Art will be the future.

I must admit that I was surprised by some of Lucía’s phrases: “In the future, museums will not collect objects but experiences,” she told me. I think that even today I continue to find meaning in that text in which, without a doubt, it revealed to me some patterns of my writing.

Leonardo da Vinci already said it more than 500 years ago, the best tool to address the world in which we live is art, although the Florentine made no distinction between art and science, like two sides of the same coin. And ultimately both are spheres of human creativity.

I recently watched the video on social media of Ameca, the humanoid robot presented at a science fair, with incredible human gestures, programmed over 15 years, to which visitors asked something about desire, to which programmed human-shaped machine, responded: “I don’t want anything. “Desire is a human emotion.”

Sam Altman, creador de ChatGPT. REUTERS/Amir Cohen/File Photo

Why do we insist on translating people’s own emotions – love, desire, insight – into a series of mathematical calculations? Tablón, who carried out the project with me, described it in an effective way: AI may feel like telling a joke but it will never feel like laughing.

And I would add: Is an artificial intelligence capable of saying that This is not a pipe by René Magritte is indeed not a pipe? I feel that we should all encrypt one last faith in language; Let it be the word – the possibility of naming – that allows us to distinguish what an AI did from what a flesh and blood person did.

The algorithm of good, says a friend, a little jokingly, when talking about how we use technology. Lucía Funes’s, I believe, were only good intentions, although I must say that the bearers of that purpose were Esteban and I. Ultimately, everything depends on what use we give to a tool. Isn’t it always like this?

Speaking of ChatGTP, the “fine print” – which, being so small, deserves a huge mention – resembles the most convincing script for a Hollywood movie. Its creator, Sam Altman, knew from the beginning how powerful this tool was that brings together all the wisdom and knowledge of history in one place, as had never happened before.

How in the future will we be able to distinguish what was created by a machine and what was created by humans? How will we know what is true and what is not? (Do you remember the Pope dressed in Balenciaga?). Altman proposes that all human beings on this planet scan the retinas of our eyes, and thus our biometric data goes to an app. An app that was created by… ah, yes, Sam Altman, the same guy from Chat GTP. But that’s for another book. I only have to finish by clarifying that “this article was not written by an Artificial Intelligence”.

Biblioteca Leamos is a collection of e-books that are downloaded for free from the Bajalibros digital platform. Although its content is constantly increasing, at this time you can find, among other titles, The Winds, by Mario Vargas Llosa, Muchachos” and El Camino de los Heroes”, about the World Cup in Qatar and the Argentine National Team; Fronteras, the investigation into drug trafficking in northern Argentina by Lucía Salinas; The great secret of Perón’s return in 1973, by renowned journalist Juan “Tata” Yofre, The greatest wish in the world, by Luciana Mantero, 7 keys to getting through cancer, by Daniela Hacker and Francisco. Ten years of the Latin American Pope, which reviews the decade in which the Argentine Holy Father has served as the highest authority of the Church of Rome.

O My beloved Moreno of my heart, the heartbreaking letters that María Guadalupe Cuenca de Moreno sent her her husband, the Argentine patriot Mariano Moreno. He had embarked for London… without knowing that while she was writing his body she was already at the bottom of the sea. There is also a reflection on the police genre by one of its great writers and readers, Jorge Fernández Díaz.

And classics like Little Women, 1984, Don Quixote de la Mancha or Hamlet. And works that aim to alleviate some of the great problems of this era, such as How to combat stress, 60 ways to live without anxiety and 60 keys to improve your self-esteem. There are also books like 60 Tips for Being Good Parents, Myth or Reality? Eight postulates about nutrition that should be reviewed, by Francis Holway and Biography of my cancer, by Patricia Kolesnicov.

And more: explore it in Biblioteca Leamos clicking here.

Leamos Library also has an outstanding children’s collection made up of more than 20 titles, among which are The Little Prince, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Tom Thumb and Hansel and Gretel. The collection also features stories by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift. As a novelty, the selection has narratives from the popular traditions of Latin America.

The children’s collection can be downloaded clicking here.

2023-10-10 06:34:21
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