Until 18 December 2020 works by 
Domenico Barra and 
Refik Anadol are featured as part of WIPO: AI and IP, A Virtual Experience, an online exhibition created using 360 degree scanning technology.
The event is hosted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the international organisation for the organisation, promotion and protection of intellectual property policy, and is the first exhibition launched at WIPO. Unveiled during the WIPO Conference on the Global Digital Content Market (16-18 September), the exhibition presents a range of projects in the fields of art, music, technology, IP policy and entertainment, and aims to explore the relationship between Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence from a range of linked perspectives.
AI has an increasingly prominent role in the infrastructures underpinning culture, industry and society. The implications of this are still being unfolded; the WIPO exhibition contributes to this unfolding by presenting artworks which pose questions about the use of AI - and associated challenges to Intellectual Property - in the arts, technology, music and entertainment.
The exhibition is on display virtually from the WIPO premises; visitors can explore 360 degree footage of spaces including the WIPO library (home to some of the world’s earliest IP publications). Arranged in these digital spaces are a number of AI artworks, interactive games, talks and other exhibits which visitors can travel through via their web browser. Alongside the exhibition, WIPO will hold a series of special events online, some of which interact live with the exhibits.
As part of the AI and Art section of the event, Refik Anadol presents Machine Hallucinations - Nature Dreams / Latent Cinema, part of Refik Anadol Studio’s Machine Hallucination project. The project explores what it means for algorithms to dream or imagine by attempting to paint with machine consciousness. Generative Adversarial Network algorithms (GANs) are trained by an enormous bank of images with human traces removed. Over time the GANS are fed more images, gradually developing AI interpretations of what life without human traces - nature - looks like. The project follows Archive Dreaming, Anadol’s earlier work with Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence program and Salt Research collections.
Elsewhere in the AI and Art section is an AI Art Gallery featuring works by Ahmed Elgammal, Alexia Achilleos, Domenico Barra, Juan Camilo, Ai-Da Robot and Pix10. Each of the artists integrates Artificial Intelligence into their practice in a different and fascinating way and we advise spending some time exploring each.
Domenico Barra presents four Artificial Intelligence driven projects as part of the Gallery. Deus Ex Machina is a video composition featuring AI animations generated by GANtools, a Python-based model by Liz Everett which generates images using bigGAN. Erased Human uses Creative Morphing training cycles (by Playform) to transform starter images through iterative machine interpretation; the results of this process were edited into a digital collage and then a glitch video using Databending. “The machine makes a choice and acts on its decision to deliver the best results from the corrupted data. The artist supports the idea of identifying in this process (databending) as a very primitive form of AI”.
Artificialemente uses Creative Morph models to process two different image datasets linked to the city of Naples; the results from processing the first set informs the processing of the second. The project is encountered as “a surrealist tale narrated through Instagram stories”. For SO[N]NO, images from the Artificialemente were arranged into a self-portrait of the artist and his city. The artwork’s title is a play on two Italian words: Sonno (‘sleeping’) and Sono (I am).
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Top image - Erased Human by Domenico Barra - still image made with Creative Morphing, 2019.
