Artist Statement 

June 13, MACBA – Convent dels Àngels. Session: AI, Art and Machines

Keywords: AI, language, automatism, improvisation, nonhuman

The Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI) art project investigates the collaborative and improvisational interrelationship between a language artist and a language model and focuses on automated forms of creative expression across the human-nonhuman spectrum.

My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence is the both the title of my new book published by Stanford University Press and the title of my artist talk. The book grows out of the Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI) art project being developed inside the TECHNE Lab at the University of Colorado. The ACI art project investigates the interrelationship between a language artist and a language model and focuses on automated forms of creative expression across the human-nonhuman spectrum. The ACI project specifically addresses speculative forms of artificial intelligence, particularly the possibilities for creative collaboration between human and machine-generated embodiments of poetic expression. In performance and exhibition contexts, the ACI is presented as a fictional AI poet whose spoken word poetry signals the horizon of a new type of authorship that questions the philosophical, artistic, and legal implications of artificial intelligence. The ACI appears in the artist talk as a 3D “avatar-other” whose facial features and voice are uncannily like that of the artist it is engaging with. Throughout the short artist presentation, the artist engages with his 3-D doppelganger in a series of improvised poetic and conceptually stimulating riffs.

• Mark Amerika (USA) is an internationally acclaimed media artist, novelist and theorist of digital culture. A Time Magazine 100 Innovator, Amerika’s artwork has been exhibited at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens and the Walker Art Center. He is a Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado where he has served as the Founding Director of the Doctoral Program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance in the College of Media, Communication and Information and a Professor of Art and Art History. http://markamerika.com