Words and photographs by Bashair Alibrahim;
“Art must be artificial” is the phrase that welcomes the spectators of the inaugural exhibition of the Diriyah Art Futures (DAF). Opening its doors to the public in November 2024, DAF is a pioneer institution at the intersection of art, science and technology, intertwining the experiments of artists across the globe with technology as an artistic medium. Across a unique contemporary architecture that is aesthetically rooted in its historical entourage, DAF is a vibrant space that hosts temporary exhibitions, talks, masterclasses, collaborative art programs, and a residency program for both artists and scholars.
Besides the clever word play, the title of the exhibition perturbs its audience with the paradox of the lexical proximity, or rather phonological complementarity, between two seemingly very distinct concepts; one is the epitome of human creativity, imagination and inspiration: Art, and the other is a blunt, insincere replication of what once was natural: Artificial. These two divergent concepts are tied with the imposing “must be” in the title of the exhibition Art Must Be Artificial: Perspectives of AI in the Visual Arts[i]. The prescriptive tone certainly draws a parallel with Marina Abramović’s 1975 Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful, clearly brought to life by Yining Fei and Chuck Kuan’s (2019) animated video on repeat depicting an AI character of a young girl repeating the phrase “art must be artificial, artist must be artificial”. Spectators are drawn in with a mixture of malaise and curiosity as the phrase rings across the hall in the artwork placed strategically in the staircase separating the stretch of the exhibition between the ground floor and the basement, therefore making the mechanical voice in the artwork audible as a background in many parts of the exhibition; a soundtrack, so to speak, that receives the spectators and accompanies them throughout their journey.
The exhibition starts with showcasing the beginnings of computer as a tool in the 1960s and 70s with the work of artists like Vera Molnar or Harold Cohen. Curator Jérome Neutres grounds his curation perspective historically, citing Jean-Farncois Lyotard’s 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, an exhibition that explores the joint of telecommunication and arts in a postmodern era. While technology in arts is the common ground between the two exhibitions, the possibilities that AI offers defy many preconceived ideas about art and the organic, sensory nature of it. These possibilities vary from the algorithm as a medium to create art in the work of artists like Refik Anadol or Luluwah Alhomoud, or disrupting the order of the algorithm to create an artwork in Molnar’s series (Des)Ordres. AI reproduces an artificial and interactive version of nature in Miguel Chevalier’s garden, or in Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer’s ant portraits, while it is an alternative reality of stitched memories in the work of Yang Yongliang. In the work of Leonel Moura, robotics is the medium that reflects on the reality of cities, thus recreating their landscape in a live continuous performance for spectators to watch. In the work of Muhannad Shono, the spectator joins AI in creating the artwork The Library of the Unseen as they trace shapes with their vision that only AI can see and recreate; in an interesting allegory where “seeing” is understanding, AI would be the tool of understanding the audience’s perspective and recreating the shape they have in mind as it retraces their vision.
As humanity, and all of its disciplines of knowledge and arts, struggles to grapple with the concept of AI and the multifaceted challenges it imposes on concepts like authorship and originality, and as each year’s knowledge and understanding of the AI outweighs decades of human thought and development in many other fields, Art Must Be Artificial: Perspectives of AI in the Visual Arts presents an approach that de-demonizes AI and opens wide open doors for its participation as a tool and a medium as it makes a case for a collaborative output between an artist and an AI tool. In spite of the resistance that the title of this exhibition, in its imposing tone, creates in its spectators, Art Must Be Artificial takes the visitors through a journey that questions their understanding of art and what an artist does.
The Art Must Be Artificial: Perspectives of AI in the Visual Arts exhibition ran from November 26, 2024, to February 15, 2025.
*Bashair Alibrahim is a faculty and a cultural researcher at King Saud University in Riyadh-Saudi Arabia
