In Barcelona, where I live, we don’t have many electronic art exhibitions, but this year the ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) is being held here and we have some exhibitions, talks, etc. I went to the opening of one of those exhibitions a few days ago. The exhibition room was a nice space, but with no walls. I'm sure many of you can already imagine what I'm going to say…
The room was full of audiovisual works—more than 20—within a few inches of each other, each with its own sound and strong lights, without walls. The result was a cacophony in which it was impossible to watch or listen to anything properly. All of us have experienced this many times in museums and galleries, not only with electronic art but also with other types of audio-visual media and sound art.
In actuality, the contemporary museum is more like a cacophony—installations blare simultaneously while nobody listens.
Is a Museum a Factory?, Hito Steyerl
Curators should be completely aware of this, especially at niche events, so I don’t understand why this is still happening.
Well, to be honest, I can imagine some of the reasons…
Another low point of this week is that I received an email from a local organization that fights for artists' rights. They wrote to us about a travelling exhibition which intends to pay only €100 to each audiovisual artist. I must admit that my works have been exhibited in places that paid me less than €100. Sometimes you’re young and stupid, sometimes you’re desperate, and sometimes you have no idea of what the ideal conditions are because money is a taboo subject.
In Spain, we have HAMACA, a platform for visual arts and experimental audiovisuals, that has a list of fees:
RENTAL
Regular:
Day: 100€
Week: 250€
Exhibition: 900€
Education:
Day: 40€
Week: 100€
Semester: 240€
SALE
Media Library: 250€
Library: 120€
In my experience, most experimental/avant-garde film screenings and festivals don’t pay anything. Most electronic art events pay peanuts or offer you free tickets in exchange for your work, and even well-known museums have the nerve to ask you for free films and lectures. You know, ‘we pay in exposure’. The worst thing is that, in most cases, the people who organise all those things do get paid, it's only the artists who don't get paid. I've even been told that the box office takings were only for the organizers and the technicians, that the artists had to work for free.
The highlight of this week is DALL·E mini—and AI model that generates images from any prompt—, not because I like it, but because it has been really present on social media. You’ve probably seen some examples, such as the 3 included in this newsletter.
Some months ago, in a course about creative AI, the teacher asked us if we thought that machines can be creative. My answer was, and still is, no. Machines can create, of course, in the sense that they can build things, but machines have no imagination, opinions or desires, they just follow instructions.
Besides that, I have two main problems with AI. The first one is very well explained in this article about algorithms and nostalgia. The text talks mainly about predictive models, but I think that this is a problem related to AI in general.
Predictive algorithms don’t really predict anything; they just make certain kinds of pasts repeatedly reappear.
Yesterday Once More, Grafton Tanner.
AI doesn’t create from scratch, it feeds from things that were already created by us. Obviously, we artists don’t create from scratch either, we have influences, etc., but we have imagination, not just data. The other problem, which is in fact closely related to this one, is that AI models such as DALL-E mini feed on copyrighted data.
I’m not a copyright fan, I prefer open licenses, but it’s quite clear that these AI models use training datasets that include thousands of images from other sources. We know that for sure because you can’t create a mix between Pollock and David Lynch, to take just one example, without using references from their work.
Who owns the copyright of these images? What about the right of attribution and the right of integrity?
I don’t know much about copyright laws, so I can’t give any answer, but it seems to me that AI models are feeding on all of us, even if we’re not artists, without our consent. They’re eating our images, our personal data, our memories, our privacy, and spitting out conservative nostalgia. If you have read any good articles or books about this subject, let me know.
Of course, not all AI models are unethical, worrisome or alarming, but we have a huge problem lurking over us.
Now that I have more free time because in summer we have reduced working hours at my day job, the newsletter is alive again. As always, if you have any thoughts to share, you can find me here and on Twitter.
If you have some money to spare and feel generous, you can buy me a coffee—I don’t drink coffee and the weather is quite hot right now, so I’ll probably buy ice cream instead.
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See you soon!