Category: Student Blog

The technology of artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought many changes to human society both in functionality and intellectually. The idea that a “mind” could be created by a series of Algorithms fascinated people, as this meant an even more advanced integration of the everyday life with technology. It is with no surprise that, AI has found its way into the field of Art as well. There are several applications of AI in Art. For instance, this technology can be applied in the purpose of art restoration with models that attempts to reconstruct the original damaged art piece; It can also be applied for art forgeries detection. In short, AI is very useful in the art field in in a variety of ways and another application that people found for AI was to let it create its own Art.  

[above image shows the 1st AI that draws a painting without the assistance or guidance of a human in the loop]

The first significant AI artwork that was created was done by the AARON program in the 1970s created by Harold Cohen. This program could create digital art pieces autonomously inspired from the hard-coded “styles” that is inputted by the author. Since then, similar programs have emerged throughout the years all attempting to let their algorithms produce art pieces. Each one of them uses different techniques to generate these arts. Some utilizes machine learning. Where the AI is trained with human drawing, then is asked to produce an image inspired from its vast “memory”.

The above art piece is created by Obvious: A French company composed of 3 college students, used machine learning models, and train their algorithm with 15,000 portraits originally painted between the 14^th and the 20^th century. The resulting ai-generated portrait is a slightly disfigured portrait of a man. This painting was sold in auction for about 400k USD compared to its initial estimated price of 10k USD in 2018. While this artwork is very much like current trends in modern art, mainly abstract art. Its value is vastly attributed to the fact that it was not made by a human.

AI-generated art falls short on the aspect of critical making. Whatever the AI produces has limited amount of context. As it is limited at the data it was used to train with. There is no true motive, nor message that the AI is trying to express. At least, not one that the artist did not “hard-coded” into it. There is no expression through the media. Hence, it does not satisfy the conditions for it to be an art of critical making. If there is any value, it would be its lack of intent. By having no intent behind the artwork, the work becomes whatever the audience sees in it. Instead of conveying a message, it raises more the questioning of what makes art an art. In contrast, if we were to look at human made abstract art pieces such as the one above, the interpretation would have been difference simply because the artist has a motive, a reason for designing his/her work in the way the way it is.

Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. 

Banksy is an English artist whose real name and identity is unknown. Their art is often, if not always, a critique on current social and political issues. 

Banksy’s art is, in my belief, a great example of critical making. They use art in the form of graffiti, sculptures, and videos to critique social issues such as consumerism and political issues like surveillance, government corruption, and more. According to Ratto and Hoekema, “critical making is an elision of two typically disconnected modes of engagement in the world—‘critical thinking,’ often considered as abstract, explicit, linguistically based, internal and cognitively individualistic; and ‘making,’ typically understood as material, tacit, embodied, external and community-oriented.” Banksy’s art shows many examples of critical thinking combined with making. For example, the Dismaland exhibit shows many elements of critical thinking. Bansky exampains “[Dismaland is] a theme park whose big theme is – theme parks should have bigger themes.” It is a critique on our society’s consumerism and carelessness about important issues. For that reason, the park has a depressing tone to show that there is nothing fun about the major issues in the world like immigration, economic hardships, and suffering. 

Another one of Banksy’s popular pieces is their graffiti of surveillance cameras always watching us (us being civilians). Not only does this speak to government corruption, but it also critiques the widespread use of surveillance. This type of critique is even more important now with the introduction of facial recognition in policing. This is a huge problem in our digital culture today, as our reliance and use of technology is far ahead of our regulations on them. 

The way Banksy’s art combines with digital distribution is something that is interesting to me in thinking about our digital age and how it relates to critical making. Because Banksy is a street artist, most people find out about their art from their instagram or online news sources. It is interesting how even though Banksy’s art is physical, the popularization of the art is extremely dependent on digital culture and people’s dependence on social media and the internet for news and content. 

I often think about how these exhibits like Dismaland will one day become digital using forms of AR/VR to conform to our new digital age. I think this would be interesting because the idea of Banky’s art being shown using new digital forms seems contradictory to their critical works. Thus, I think the dependence on digital culture itself is something to be critiqued and can be done without the use of digital art.

Examples of Data Visualization, made with Canva

Visuals like these have become a part of our everyday lives. If you clicked into the most recent COVID-19 article, chances are it will have some sort of data visualization of the number of people sick, how that compares to the past month, and what percentage have already been vaccinated.

Due to the rise of big data and improvements in computational power, graphs and charts like these are no longer time-consuming to produce, because we can have machines perform most of the tedious tasks for us. Therefore, they have become the new standard. Just like “pics or it didn’t happen”, if you want to tell someone that something is true or if you want someone to understand how important an issue is, you should have the numbers to back it up. As a society, we have been trained by graphs and charts to develop trust in numbers and statistics and understand the severity of something by how it compares to a reference point. For example, when the NOAA and NASA report annual global temperatures, they focus not on the temperature itself but on how they compare to the 20^th-century average.

However, the way that numbers are presented can be more nuanced than we realize. If somebody told you that back in 1991, 215 out of every 100,000 cancer patients passed away, but in 2019, 146 out of every 100,000 cancer patients passed away, would you have a good feel for what that means? What if they told you that the overall cancer death rate has dropped by about a third from 1991 to 2019? Or, if they added that this means we have averted about 3.5 million deaths due to cancer during that time period? Immediately, you have a much better understanding of the significant progress cancer research has made.

Here is another example, this time from the CDC:

Source: “When Data Visualization Really Isn’t Useful (and When It Is)” by Christopher Berry, May 11, 2021 on Old Street Solutions

At first glance, it seems to make sense. The states in darker colors are the states that have the most reported cases of COVID-19. Instinctively, we understand that the darker a color is, the higher the number it represents. However, if you look closely, the coloring is all out of order. States that have no reported cases are in a darker shade than states that have 1 to 100 cases. States that have the most cases (10,001 or more) are in a light yellow. It is also very difficult to distinguish states that have no cases and states that have 101 to 1,000 cases, because they are in a similar shade of orange. This is a good example of how data can be 100% accurate, but still lead the audience to the wrong conclusion because of a simple mismatch of colors.

I think data visualizations are examples of critical making and new media because they harness technology to extend our ability to share with others our own interpretations of data. They transform numbers into something that humans can interact with. Without visualization and interpretation, data is unintelligible and therefore meaningless. However, like in the example above, we must think critically about how best to present the information to an audience that wants to glean the most out of a visual from just a quick glance. Misleading information that produces the wrong conclusion is worse than no information. Also, not every correlation is meaningful, and not everything that data proves is logical. For example, hot weather may increase ice cream sales and the risk of sunburn, which statistically correlates ice cream sales to the risk of sunburn, but we realize that this cannot be logistically true.

Source: Data Viz Project

With the growth of big data and artificial intelligence, we will only have increasingly more data points to tamper with. Data visualizations encourage us to rethink what critical making means in 2022, because the message is entirely within the medium. Traditional bar graphs and pie charts are suitable for very specific data interpretations, allowing us to see simple trends and percentages. Less conventional data visualization methods have gained popularity in the last few years, due to their ability to convey meaning in ways that traditional statistical charts can no longer compete with. Alluvial diagrams represent changes in the composition of something over time. Hive plots highlight how well something can satisfy a set of criteria. Radial histograms make it easy to display more data bars without overwhelming the reader. However, each form also comes with its own disadvantages. It takes thoughtful implementation to ensure that the form of visualization does not get in the way of interpreting the data, and complements the message it is intended to convey.

Source: “The Unwelcomed” project on ALHADAQA by Mohamad Waked

Data visualizations can also be a part of nonviolent-yet-disruptive protests, similar to electronic civil disobedience, because numbers help to justify and raise morale for activism. Websites such as the Pew Research Center and ProPublica routinely employ data visualizations to unveil important findings on social issues such as gun violence and environmental pollution. You also have independent data visualization designers such as Mohamad Waked, who started his own data visualization lab. One of his projects was an online interactive story based on the number of migrants and refugees that have passed away while crossing borders. His data visualization map helps to put into perspective the significance of the issue around the world.

Although data visualizations are not usually thought of as an art form, I would argue that it can be very powerful because it has the potential to tell true stories with a single visual. Just as a poet chooses their rhyme scheme and meter, a data visualization designer carefully chooses the form of visualization that enables their data to speak for itself. Misunderstanding can lead to false insights and poor decision-making, all under the assumption that it was backed by real data.

Isabella Wang, Feb. 7 2022

VMS 290S Spring 2022

The project – Seven Grams

Seven Grams is an augmented reality project by Karim Ben Khalif that visualizes the implications of extracting rare earth minerals for phones. It is called “Seven Grams” because your phone contains roughly seven grams of precious materials such as cobalt, gold, cassiterite, and wolframite. By visualizing the production chain of the iPhone, viewers recognize the human cost required in the production of consumer technology. By situating the development of smart phones with the emergence of exploitative economies, the project aims to denaturalize technological neutrality. The medium and message are in tension with each other because the augmented reality runs on phones that have already been produced, meaning that the program still relies on the very medium it criticizes to deliver its message. However, by uncovering the hidden reality behind the marketing of developing technology, people are forced to acknowledge the implications of constant smartphone consumption. In many ways, the augmented reality creates a dystopian world that is historically accurate to alienate people from their phones and technology. The augmented reality media acts as speculative design because it addressed a twofold societal issue: the vast human costs of exploitation in creating technology and consumer’s addiction to wasteful practices of updating and purchasing new technology. Once people apprehend the human cost behind their new gadgets, they will experience guilt for their consumptive lifestyle and will be less likely to be fooled by advertisements that display the benevolence of emerging technology. Although the media program does not dismantle anything, the project serves the purpose of electronic civil disobedience by creating an anti-advertisement that intends to change consumer practices away from consumption. By centering the narrative of those experiencing dehumanization through rare earth mineral extraction, the Seven Grams project flips the script surrounding smartphones to reveal the unsettling consequences of their production.

The Seven Grams project has three forms of media: augmented reality, a documentary, and solution journalism. Both the augmented reality and documentary are in 3D because Karim Ben Khelifa documented his surroundings with emerging media such as VR, AR, and 360-degree soundscapes that immerse the audience more deeply into the reality he describes. Solution journalism centers developing changes to people’s behavior and concrete measure to improve the conditions that people are subjected to within the media. Not only does the media demonstrate the human cost involved, but it “will also offer them a lever to improve the way hardware manufacturers source gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten.” The program also centers the geopolitical relationships between the US and the Democratic Republic of Congo to visualize the global imbalances within the unequal exchange of commodities in technological production. The inequality is visualized by the demonstration that “he world’s most powerful economy, the United States, has been valued at $21 000 billion in 2020, the total value of the mineral resources in the soil of the DRC is estimated at $24 000 billion.” Then the medium asks the question: how is this possible when the DRC is 175^th out of 181 countries on the Human Development Index. By situating the extractive economies of smartphones within the reality of economic inequality, consumers are forced to grapple with the international and geopolitical consequences of their purchasing habits. The media is an example of critical making because it intends to disrupt the exchanges between producers and suppliers that make this ongoing inequality a reality, immersing the consumers in an augmented reality that has always been intentionally hidden from them.

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“Message IS the BOTtle” is an NFT digital animation piece that attempts to be an example of critical making, but, in my opinion, falls short.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a quintessential example of “new media.” The use of blockchain technology to host and distribute art utilizes the Internet and computation in a new and innovative way, highlighting “new media”. Most commonly, NFTs have been in the form of digital visual art and animation but have also been used for music distribution, sports trading, and more. In theory, NFTs provide a decentralized outlet for artists to reclaim their digital art and change the conversation around why art should be compensated and valued. However, NFTs, in practice, have posed many obstacles to achieving this utopian marketplace. NFTs in practice only hold value as the audience for NFTs grows, representing a quasi-pyramid scheme and focusing a significant portion of the conversation of art around ownership and receipts. This detracts away from the appreciation and social conversation that art sparks and devalues the creative aspects.

This piece, “Message IS the BOTtle,” is a part of the “Ocean Drop” collection hosted on the DoinGud NFT Marketplace Platform. DoinGud was created with the intention of developing an avenue for creators to direct support for social causes through their NFT art. DoinGud boasts “accessible and sustainable NFTs” and “community-owned galleries,” presenting a socially conscious image behind their product.

The description of “Message IS the BOTtle” reads as follows:

“In this digital animation, the bottle is a metaphor for human consciousness, as we embrace the technological advancement of the blockchain. Historically the bottle was a vessel carrying a distress signal. The mirror ambigram SOS now is the bottle itself reflected in the ocean, a desperate call to attention of plastic waste pollution. The dual message also comes from the longing we humans have to connect with others through the technologies, at the cost of destroying the beautiful, romantic sunset ocean view. The bottle is a message from the past to the future – a symbolism of conscious efforts to shape a way we coexist harmoniously with nature and technology.”

This description really highlights the way in which this piece, and NFTs en masse, contradict our definition of critical making. Matt Ratto’s definition of critical making requires critical social reflection, which this piece fails to do. Blockchain technology is incredibly energy-inefficient, on purpose. Using exorbitant amounts of energy is required to keep the blockchain secure and verify transactions. The detrimental environmental impact of NFTs makes the attempt to spread a message of “coexisting harmoniously with nature and technology” seem frivolous. We understand that the medium truly is the message, and in this case, the medium of NFTs voids any attempt to share a socially critical message.

In 2022, we must understand that the impacts of the technology we are using to create “critical art” must be seriously considered and accounted for.

The following picture shows the “Message IS the BOTtle” NFT hosted on the DoinGud website. I’ve provided a link to this product here for a better viewing experience, as the NFT is a digital animation.