The-Island-was-a-World_catalogue-digital

7 Artist and Artificial Intelligence in a Poetic Dialogue: Oren Eliav, The Island was a World Hava Aldouby The interface between art and generative AI carries both a promise and a threat. At the center of the techno-cultural discourse stands an old question: Will humanity ever succeed in creating a "Golem" that surpasses its human counterparts and, could this Golem be an existential or identity threat to the human species? In his article, "The Machine as Artist as Myth," 1 curator and art historian Andreas Broeckmann reviews the dystopic idea of generativemachines threatening to replaceMankind or fundamentally change it. Broeckmann's comprehensive historical review shows that this myth is not exclusive to the digital era and did not emerge with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Among other things, he mentions the 1934 exhibition, "Machine Art," at New York's MoMA. Today, we would categorize an exhibition such as this - which displayed screws, containers, and various instruments - as belonging to the Industrial Design field. In its time, however, it revolved around "The Machine as an Artist." The museum's renowned curator, Alfred Barr, wrote in the exhibition's catalogue, "Not only must we bind Frankenstein but we must make him beautiful." 2 Barr chose Frankenstein, the creator of a modern version of the Golem, to symbolize the threat of a machine capable of human-like creation. Broeckmann, for his part, strongly opposes the antagonistic confrontation of the human persona with a machine. He calls our attention to the recurrence of anthropomorphic terms, such as, "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence" which instill the idea that machines can rob Man of his humanity. Broeckmann maintains that only if we let go of the dichotomic model that sees machines as a threat to humanity will we be able to critically and freely discuss the ancient myth that determines our perception of the interface between technology and art. In 1965, about three decades after the MoMA exhibition, the first exhibitions of computer- generated art opened in New York and Stuttgart. The exhibitions were unrelated, but both encountered suspicion and antagonism. The exhibition at the Technological Institute of Stuttgart University comprised computer works by Georg Nees (1926-2016), a mathematician and a Siemens engineer. Art professors invited to the opening asked Nees if he thought he could 1 Broeckmann, Andreas. 2019. "The machine as artist as myth." Arts 8 (1): 25. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8010025 2 Ibid.