on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
As artistic director of Serpentine in London, Hans Ulrich Obrist has championed all kinds of future-facing art. This year, Obrist—whom the New Yorker once called “the curator who never sleeps”—took that one step further by declaring a “Year of AI” at the lauded institution.
Since joining the gallery’s leadership team in 2006, Obrist has worked to turn Serpentine into a sort of laboratory. Notable experimental projects and exhibitions he has brought to the institution include Cécile B. Evans’s AGNES, commissioned for Serpentine’s website in 2014; Ian Cheng’s “sentient artwork” BOB (Bag of Beliefs) and Emissaries, a “video game that plays itself,” in 2018; and NEW FICTION, for which KAWS exhibited artworks at Serpentine as well as within the digital world of Fortnite in 2022.
(…)
When did you first become interested in AI-related art? How far back does that curiosity go?
I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while—in a way, back to my student days. When I started as a curator in the early ’90s, I was inspired by Billy Klüver and Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). I went to meet Billy, who with Robert Whitman started that amazing project with Bell Laboratories. I was wondering what could be a sort of E.A.T. for our time and how we could bring art and science and technology together. I was also part of the Academy for the Third Millennium and met lots of scientists through that. Actually it was Bruce Sterling, the writer who, alongside William Gibson, was one of the pioneers of cyberpunk, who got me on email in the early ’90s. At the time not many people had it, and he sent me to cybercafe to open an email account. Then I started to try to find people in the art world who were on email.
It’s important to remember that this current wave of AI is not the first….