LAS Art Foundation and Google Arts & Culture unveil AI artist residency works

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For something a bit more creative, Google Arts & Culture Lab has written about its online artist residency with the LAS Art Foundation, focused on digital world building and simulating living systems. Two artists were commissioned to explore frontier AI research and use it to think about life, matter and consciousness. The results are now viewable on the Google Arts & Culture website and the LAS Art Foundation site. It makes a change from the usual AI headlines about safety and money

Xin Liu created a work called nom nom, which explores the idea of collective intelligence emerging from millions of interacting particles. It uses Neural Cellular Automata, a type of model where lots of tiny neural networks each react only to their surroundings. Liu said she wanted to explore an image of intelligence distributed across millions of tiny networks. It is a lovely idea, especially as most AI today is built as one huge centralised model

Eunjo Lee made In Your Eyes, Before My Own, which pulls together ancient philosophy, linguistics and modern psychology. The piece combines hand drawn sketches, 3D assets, motion captured choreography and the sounds of Korean Hangul. Lee described the commission as opening up a vast alchemical laboratory. Google's Veo video model and its Nano Banana tool, used to turn images into 3D assets, were among the tools involved

This sort of project raises the familiar debate about AI and art. Some people see it as a new medium, like photography or video once were, while others worry it undermines human artists. Here, at least, the artists are clearly in the driving seat, using AI as one tool among many alongside drawing and choreography

Has anyone had a look at the works yet? I would be curious whether people think residencies like this help artists, or mostly serve as good publicity for the tech companies funding them

Experience two artists' perspectives on philosophy, science, and AIblog.google