AI at the Maker Art Faire in Rome

Friday 22nd October, 2021 - Bruce Sterling

*We didn’t make it to Maker Faire in Rome this year, but that’s quite an interesting review of some of the tech-art there.

https://www.arshake.com/en/you-and-ai-alla-maker-art-fair/

These are the initial questions behind the artistic exhibition curated by Irini Mirena Papadimitriou and Valentino Catricalà presented at this edition of Maker Faire. The encounter between art and new technologies has given rise to a scenario populated by luminous screens and self-powered objects which reflect the latest artistic innovations. The art/new media pairing perfectly encapsulated in the exhibition represents the semantic and aesthetic evolution behind everyday cultural dynamics which are transformed into the most diverse forms within the space…

Data manipulation combined with AI shapes the world, marks its evolution and allows for total control. In Capture, Paolo Cirio shows the potential uses and abuses of facial recognition and artificial intelligence, questioning the asymmetry of power and the value of democracy. The photo series Capture consists of the faces of French police officers extrapolated from a thousand public images. Photos taken during the protests in France were processed with facial recognition software and the 4,000 faces of police officers, identified by name, were uploaded onto an online database. The artist also printed the officers’ headshots as street art posters that he then displayed all over Paris, crossing over into the public sphere even more….