Barcelona Metropolis

In the two-plus decades of this century, artificial intelligence has seeped into all realms of life: from the intimacy of a couple to education, artistic creation, scientific research, the media, entertainment, medicine, economics, politics… Human intelligence no longer holds a monopoly in a world that is also being reconstructed by artificial intelligence. And this very world is no longer a near future, but an immediate present that is built on neurons and chips, memories and databases, imagination and computational forecasts, thoughts and algorithms. Are humans ready to interact with it safely? Where do we end and where does artificial intelligence begin? Is it really capable of learning? Is it creative? Is it sustainable? Can it make decisions independently of human participation? These are some of the many questions posed by Artificial Intelligence, the CCCB’s major exhibition this autumn, which, in part, is fed by the exhibition AI: More Than Human, presented in 2019 at the Barbican Centre in London. But, spoiler alert, the answers are not here, only the desire to make visitors engage in reflection from an intersection as complex as it is appealing, linking history, art and science.

The meeting point between art and science is the focus of the exhibition. Who is the artist and who is the assistant in a creation generated by Midjourney? According to Nacenta, authorship should be split 50/50. “It’s a collaboration, one cannot exist without the other. Although there is a tendency to hide it, artificial intelligence features considerable human intervention, but we like to say that it is a robot,” he says ironically. Some of the artistic works exhibited at the CCCB have already been seen at the Barbican Centre, such as Es Devlin’s portrait poems or the meticulous work of Anna Ridler, who, with the manual classification of ten thousand tulips she photographed herself, lays bare the precarious labour that lies behind the enormous data banks.

In order to show the potential of Barcelona and Catalonia as a hub for artificial intelligence, Nacenta has also worked alongside the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), led by Jordi Torres and his team. A collaboration that has crystallised with an installation around the singer Maria Arnal, who has generated an artificial alter ego that can reach more vocal registers than the real one and with which visitors will be able to interact. However, the list of artists is longer: Massive Attack, Mario Klingemann, Neri Oxman, Joy Buolamwini, Yoichi Ochiai, Kode9, Chris Salter… Each one, from their respective fields, shows how the power of art to decipher the complexity of the world is still intact. Even when it comes to artificial intelligence.