You and AI: Through the Algorithmic Lens

"You and AI" is an exhibition that explores artificial intelligence not as some future potentiality but as a present-day reality. From social media platforms using algorithms to select the content we see and hear, not to mention our friends and where we go out, to digital maps that suggest places for us to go and how to get there, to predictive text on our mobile devices that completes our sentences for us, writing along with us, artificial intelligence is now to be found on our very bodies.

The "You and AI" Festival – presented at Pedion tou Areos Park from June 24 to July 25, 2021 – consists of 25 works that examine three topics corresponding to three routes through the exhibition. Namely: how we view artificial intelligence, and how it views us; artificial intelligence as a key factor shaping public space, political process, and today’s democracy; and artificial intelligence as a constituent part of – and substitute for – the natural environment. The exhibition is structured in a way that allows visitors to encounter works through a process of curated serendipity: having the works – in the main large-scale HD screens, 3D sculptures, and installations – nestled within the park’s vegetation, and accompanied by soundscapes that activate when spectators / listeners approach specific points, means that the natural and the artificial, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the digital and the physical, the accidental and the intentional all enter into dialog to create an accurate expression of the experiences that artificial intelligence has brought into our lives.

The venue we selected for the Festival is Pedion tou Areos Park. This was no accident. As a public garden, it constitutes a space that is natural but also artificial; it takes physical form but constitutes a social construct; and it is itself alive – as a community of people and a public space. Artificial intelligence – an eminently technological mode of expression – is our new natural habitat, constantly mediating digital public spaces via social media platforms, as well as physical public spaces via applications that offer navigation, delivery, lodging, and ride-hailing. It feeds off the digital traces left behind as people move through a city, work and chat, even fall in love. Furthermore, Pedion tou Areos (meaning “Field of Ares”) was once an army training ground that became a place for recreation, whereas artificial intelligence – which also sprang from military applications – started out in the social networking sphere and ended up being used as an instrument of power and coercion.

But above all, Pedion tou Areos Park constitutes the heart of a new Athens – a multicultural Athens brimming with diverse communities – but also a place where public space is being discovered anew, where young people are being brought together with older citizens, and where the digital encounters the physical, public meets private, and artificial intelligence connects with each of us.

From June 24 to July 25, Pedion tou Areos will act as the backdrop for 25 artworks on artificial intelligence that take the form of digital screens and interactive works, as well as sculptures, posters, and interactive installations. The exhibition will also exist in digital form on onassis.org with public film screenings, digital works, online conferences and academic forums, and an exhibition catalog in digital format that visitors can download onto their phones.

“Every time you create a taxonomy, there's always a politics to that – because when you're creating a taxonomy, you're saying this is a range of categories that are intelligible, and it's always going to be a limited range. In doing so you're always creating a negative space the things that are outside of that, the things that are not intelligible.”
—Trevor Paglen (Trevor Paglen, Anthony Downey, “Algorithmic anxieties: Trevor Paglen in conversation with Anthony Downey,” “Digital War’, 2020)

At the same time, advanced forms of technology, classification and prediction are not only leading to new levels of surveillance, but also bringing back and re-establishing previously abandoned pseudo-scientific systems such as physiognomy. Judging a person’s character based on physical attributes was championed by criminology and forensics theorists such as Cesare Lombroso and Alphonse Bertillon in the 19th century, but as it’s well known such interpretations relied on racist stereotypes. Physiognomy and evaluating one’s character and morality from their appearance, goes further back in time, with the ancient Greek treatise ‘Φυσιογνωμονικά’ (pronounced: Physiognomonika, latin: Physiognomonics), but also in Medieval and Renaissance times with studies by Giambattista della Porta in the 16th century, and the work of Johann Casper Lavater in the 18th century. Thanks to the development of biometrics and facial recognition systems such dubious practices have now resurfaced quantifying the human body in a number of new applications including ergonomics, architecture, forensic science, and more.

A production of – invisible to humans – layers of machine-generated languages and images, mainly based on human monitoring, quantification and examination, are created by machines to be read by other machines. One can only wonder whether through these journeys we have been developing systems that enable new forms of – invisible – bureaucracies, or societies of unparalleled digital control.

If algorithmic systems create a new reality and state of conformity, who and what is left in the negative space of these processes? Whose intelligence and values are incorporated? Taking Mark Fisher’s term ‘reflexive impotence’ in “Capitalist Realism,” to describe how people, while recognizing the broken nature of capitalism, can’t see any means of effecting change, we could maybe identify a potential similar resignation to a new reality of artificial intelligence and machine decision-making systems.

The thought that people could be controlled by machines, which once was considered to be a sign of madness, doesn’t feel so fallacious today; political and peace activist James Tilly Matthews revealed a world of brainwashing, mind reading and spying in the form of ‘magnetic rays’ emitted by a futuristic machine called ‘Air Loom’ in John Haslam’s “Illustrations of Madness” in 1810. While been involved in persuading the French government to commit to peace with Britain, Matthews was arrested on suspicion of being a spy and years later was arrested, judged and sent to the notorious Bedlam asylum in London in 1797. His ‘Air Loom’ machine, implicated in a narrative of politics in 18th century France, could be viewed as a prophetic vision today.

At the time of the development of this project, we are still navigating our way through the COVID-19 pandemic crisis – a highly impactful event for people, society, culture, economy and environment, but also a crisis that has had a profound influence on human behavior, living and working. The pandemic comes at a time of ongoing crises, from conflicts, authoritarianism, climate change to name a few that we have been facing and will continue to face. Could this be a changing point in terms of how we think, interact with, behave or care about people, other species, places, nature? Could this possibly be a time to rethink the consequences of creating unjust systems or messing with ecosystems?

− Irini Mirena Papadimitriou, FutureEverything