Introducing: 'The Art & Tech' series
In the span of just 2½ months, it’s hard to believe our lives could be any more digital than they already were. The quarantine accelerated what was already slowly starting to take place in the virtual world, as we embraced current and new technologies - initiated by some platforms earlier than others. Digital initiatives triumph now at galleries, auction houses, museums, foundations and cultural institutions as their programming migrate online, streamlining their processes to provide virtual access to arts and culture, to maintain the market, and push education and learning resources at full speed ahead. Technologically speaking, very little seems groundbreaking at the moment, especially when compared to the retail or gaming industries, but the momentum in building an online presence is considerably growing, whether it’s a virtual reality exhibition, the countless Zoom webinars or Youtube channels you’ve been scrolling.
Mario Klingemann, Memories of Passerby I. Credits to Sotheby’s. Sold GBP 40,000, March 2019, Contemporary Art Day Auction, London.
Mid East Art presents the ‘Art & Tech’ series - covering interviews with artists, gallery owners and foundations on the impact of the digital in their line of work. I’ll keep it as a subset within my ‘Quarantine Files’ since we are all still much in the quarantine these days and the digital is definitely a theme one cannot leave out during these days in isolation. The upcoming menagerie of tech posts for this series will hopefully enlighten us on some cutting-edge topics in the programming and virtual worlds and deliver a dollop on the shaken, but adapting art market.
In what ways has the quarantine enhanced my art appreciation? My attention span for digital art. I will admit that I’m the. last person to watch an entire film or long video in a gallery or museum when surrounded by so many distractions. But in the midst of the 24 hour quarantine lockdown in Dubai early April I sat for a good 45 minutes watching a few of Robert Wilson’s experimental video portraits that the artist just unleashed online for the first time. First starting these portraits in the 1970s, the American experimental theater stage director and playwright, returned to this in 2004 and included the likes of Brad Pitt and Isabella Rossellini in crafted high definition mises-en-scènes, along with other subjects like a snowy owl or black panther presented in an HD video with blurred form in time-based cinematography and still photography. Opening my laptop, I was submerged into Wilson’s world, my eyes were completely concentrated on the screen and I was at the edge of my seat, with no distractions. I must admit I was very much waiting for a hyper-realistic version of the bloody bearded wolf to to notice the humble lamb on the adjacent panel - spoiler: the lamb is safe (to see ‘Winter Fable’). All at once, choreography is met with advanced technologies in the backdrop of a surreal, dreamlike moving landscape caught within the slowness of very fine stills.
Robert Wilson, ‘Winona Ryder.’ Image courtesy of the artist.
Later that week I was confronted with Samia Halaby’s video works after seeing Sultan Al Qassemi’s Cultural Majlis talks. In front of my screen I was presented with an abstraction of sound, rhythm, form, motion and color in a carefully systemic order articulated by Halaby herself. The artist began to code in the 1980s, first on her sister’s Apple II computer and then on the Amiga 1000, teaching herself the BASIC and C programming languages to create her "kinetic paintings.” Halaby is also the director of the Kinetic Painting Group, as she works with musicians who use acoustic and electronic instruments; the live sound and animations presented have been performed by dancers, storytellers, and poets, among others. As the artist said on the majlis talk “I felt, and I still do, that programming is a very beautiful language. It imitates how a city works, it imitates so much that is in our life: the moving from part to part [is] what a function does.” (to hear her talk at the Guggenheim about her work here).
Samia Halaby with her Amiga 1000 in 1987. Image courtesy Ayyam Gallery
Still from "Yafa" by The Kinetic Painting Group, directed by Samia Halaby. Performance at Goddard Riverside Community Center Image courtesy of Samia Halaby.
Missing our gallery strolls these days and the excitement of attending live auctions? Have no fear. Time-based exhibitions, fairs and online-only auctions and virtual viewing rooms for private sales have swept our calendars. Digitally packing my bags, I attended my very own Art Basel Hong Kong late March, catching the end of the fair just a few hours before the virtual viewing rooms closed. Sadly I missed the VIP viewing days as I was fashionably late (in my slippers and pajamas). It was all a bit overwhelming, with thousands of works to check out at my fingertips on infinite scrolls. Basel Hong Kong was the first major fair to migrate to virtual viewing rooms, displaying their works in virtual white cubes, free of cost and with most artwork prices transparent to the public which points to another shift in today’s market..
Art Basel's online viewing rooms: Fergus McCaffrey. Courtesy of the gallery.
In the UAE, while I sorely miss my trips to Sharjah Art Museum, I now can view Barjeel Art Foundation’s ‘A Century in Flux’ exhibition virtually here. A nice stroll through their works with some recent additions since I last visited in person. The Louvre Abu Dhabi unleashed a new app where you can take a digital tour of the museum’s highlights, even with a virtual tour guide. There’s even an 8-year timelapse of Louvre Abu Dhabi’s construction. Virtual tours are available at Dubai Museum, Al Ain Palace Museum, Dubai’s Etihad Museum and Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization. A perfect starter kit to home-schooling the kids these days.
Alserkal Avenue, the gallery district in Dubai had unveiled a virtual gallery walkthrough in March in lieu of the Galleries Night and has since continued to push the limit in unveiling digital events. Six Dubai galleries galleries just participated in ‘not cancelled’ art - a week-long digital art event that began on 21 May that helps promote and sell their works in a sustainable way.
The 14th edition of Art Dubai far went online focusing on themes of art as a form of healing. Four digital gallery spaces explored Modern art, Contemporary art, Bawwaba ( ‘gateway’ in Arabic), showcasing works specifically for the fair. ‘Residents’ featured solo artists from around the world who participated in a UAE-based residency, producing works around the theme of ‘Africa’.
A preview of Alserkal Avenue's online platform, which becomes available to the public on Monday evening. Courtesy Alserkal Avenue
Art Dubai Fair’s Online Catalog 2020.
Happening earlier this month, Frieze New York introduced an augmented reality feature for its first virtual fair, with over 160 galleries participating. Oliver Miro, son to the renowned dealer Victoria Miro, developed a virtual and augmented reality platform called Vortic, allowing galleries to virtually hang up their show as they would in the gallery. This was launched and presented in collaboration with David Zwirner and Victoria Miro galleries. Amidst the looming distractions on our phones these days and the precious need to experience the gallery culture for collectors, the online viewing rooms won’t replace seeing the works in person, but it’s a good substitute than not seeing the works at all!
On Artificial Intelligence (A.I) and Art:
Obvious, ‘Portrait of Edmond Bellamy ‘ (2018). Christie’s Images Limited.
AI in art has been around for longer than we think, much earlier than the recent boom in blockchain in the arts just this 2017-2018. The Art & Tech series will explore the synergy between AI programming and artistic production, including interviews and some reviews with those working in this cutting-edge process. AI in the arts appeared since the elate 1950s, produced by a group of engineers at Max Bense’s laboratory at the University of Stuttgart started experimenting with computer graphics. Artists like Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molná began to explore algorithms, computers and plotters in producing these systemic machine generated works. Max Bense even went on to provide a theoretical framework that these works provided an opposite to fascism. As writer Fabian Offert stated ‘The literally “calculated” aesthetic of computer art, according to Bense, intentionally avoids all appeal to emotion, and thus makes it immune political abuse.’
In the auction world, Christie’s sold in October 2018 the first A.I-generated art to come to auction, Portrait of Edmond Bellamy (2018), selling for $432,500, opening a wide debate on the fundamental question from the artistic community if the work can be called ‘art’ if the visual image of the work was produced by an algorithm (noted as the signature on the bottom). That next month, the auction house’s sale of the Barney A. Ebsworth Collection marked the first time an art auction at this price level (achieving $317,801,250) has been recorded on a blockchain via a secure digital registry administered by Artory, an art centric technology provider.
Frieder Nake, Untitled (1967), Tate Modern, London, source
Last June 2019 I had the chance to visit Christie’s New York hosted an “Art & Tech Summit: The A.I Revolution,” a forum that brought together artists and creatives along with industry experts for a discussion on the impact of A.I within all avenues of the art world and the future of the industry. This was produced with Christie’s Education and presented by Hyundai, furthering the auction houses’ presence as a leader in global innovation and presenting an arena on cultivating new ideas in emerging trends and predications. Panelists included those who produced AI tool platforms and databases such as ArtPI and Artnome, representatives from Google Arts & Culture and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with artists and filmmakers who are harnessing this new technology in their creations.
A.I technology looks for patterns in massive amounts of data through machine learning, going so far to attempt to approximate how the human brain works. In what ways can human expertise and data collection produce and enhance visual experiences for audiences and professionals, create more transparent markets, and provide further context to the artworks AI based works are being produced? The discussions that resulted from this summit point to the fact that technology won’t disrupt the art market, but instead, will help supplement and progress it, both in terms of transparency in transactions and providing more engaging, thought provoking curatorial programming to happen. In the creative fields, it takes these techies just as much creativity and energy to produce these algorithms, becoming a form of conceptual art in itself.
Christie’s also hosted the New York debut of the Yugen, a moving image artwork using A.I created by filmmaker and artist Martha Fiennes and featuring the actor Salma Hayek Pinault that layers of pre-recorded action sequences, musical scores and digital backgrounds. Others include digital artists and collectives that incorporate A.I, such as Mike Tyka and the kinetic art collective BREAKFAST.
Yugen featuring Salma Hayek. Image courtesy of director Martha Fiennes.
Mike Tyka, Portraits of Imaginary People. Image courtesy of the artist.
Tyka has worked with artificial neural networks as an artistic medium and tool, popular for his work with Google DeepDream, choosing to display at Christie’s his latest generative portraits series Portraits of Imaginary People where he depicts portraits of people who don’t exist, a chilling indicator of technology’s ability to imitate our present realities.
Just as the summit’s discussions on A.I analytics capitalize the role of technology in today’s art world, they more importantly underscore the importance that the art historians and arts professionals have in engaging with these creative technologies. Today, humans are still more sophisticated than machines (I cannot promise that in the future) in our ability to investigate the deeper semantics of art across multiple layers, so it is more of a collaboration than a power struggle. Algorithms are thirsty for data and are eager to collaborate with us. As exhibitions and museum collections are highlighting underrepresented artists and regions and historians are uncovering groundbreaking research, specialists can uncover underlying patterns that can help us analyze disparate regions and associated art movements and incorporate this into a global knowledge database.
I am looking forward to sharing with you these fascinating interviews and coverage on the art and tech world as part of this new series on Mid East Art. It seems my mind has been drifting to the Silicon Valley tech world and everything in between these days..