The Centre Pompidou – Musée National d'Art Moderne and KADIST in Paris, France, are currently presenting Apophenia, Interruptions: Artists and Artificial Intelligence at Work, a group show of six art installations by Agnieszka Kurant, Auriea Harvey, Éric Baudelaire, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Ho Rui An, and Interspecifics. The exhibition presents artworks that activate current-generation commercially available artificial intelligence (AI) technology, embracing its fallibility and pushing it to its limits. The show, on from September 25, 2024 – January 6, 2025, is curated by Joseph del Pesco, international director, KADIST and Marcella Lista, chief curator, new media collections department, Centre Pompidou – Musée National d'Art Moderne. The duo discuss the exhibition and the artworks on display in an interview with STIR.

This is—in fact—one of the premises of the project: the paradox of playing logic when a sense of crisis and collapse dominates.” – - Marcella Lista, chief curator, new media collections department, Centre Pompidou - Musée National d'Art Moderne

‘Apophenia’ is a term that was coined by German psychologist Klaus Conrad in 1958 in a publication concerning the onset of schizophrenia. In his words, it is an “unmotivated seeing of connections (accompanied by) a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness”. The curators have linked the term to the errors that occur in the pattern-recognition processes in widely available AI tools. An exploration of AI art across social media reveals what these errors yield visually – for example, AI-generated portraits that have one too many fingers or blend parts of the subject’s clothes with their background. Many deride AI art as lazy and devoid of skill, and as Lista rightly notes, “There's this prejudice that AI will do the art in the place of the artist.” And the curator adds, “What the show really states is the fact that it's really (just) a medium like any other. It's the way you use it that makes the art.”

The works in Apophenia, Interruptions present novel examples of the possibilities that lie at the intersection of AI and artmaking. Lista draws our attention to Tales of Narrativelessness (2024) by Paris-based Franco-American contemporary artist and filmmaker Éric Baudelaire. To quote the press release, “[The installation] questions the promise of AI, exploring its capacity to create new stories and debate grand narratives.” It is composed of three benches—of a sort that is familiar to Parisians—with a conversation between three AI models (produced by OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral) converted from text to speech over speakers and projected onto the wall next to the benches. The AI models discuss complex philosophical questions, including questions about whether art can exist without human beings and if human beings can exist without art.

Tales of Narrativelessness uses four computers—one that organises conversations and three systems that correspond to the three benches, receiving the first’s instructions and playing out the role of one character each. As Lista tells us, “What Eric Baudelaire's work creates is a situation where we find ourselves in a kind of public space of debate.” The models draw on a limitless well of ideas that are culled from online content to ensure that no iteration of this conversation is ever repeated. However, at Centre Pompidou, audiences can experience a total of nearly 1000 recorded iterations. The AI models explore questions with no easy answers, and as Lista mentions, their capacity to reason within such scenarios is impressive. In her words, “This is—in fact—one of the premises of the project: the paradox of playing logic when a sense of crisis and collapse dominates.”

Apophenia, Interruptions also presents AI-powered contemporary art created by seasoned operators. Artists, musicians and technology researchers Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst—from the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively—present the short video I’M HERE 17.12.2022 5:44 (2023), which is created through a highly customised version of the text-to-image AI model Stable Diffusion, run on a supercomputer in their Berlin studio. The influential duo are among the earliest artists to tap into AI; they tailored the copy of the AI tool on their system specifically for the project, creating custom guidance parameters for elements of the process such as image generation and depth of field.

I’M HERE is a deeply personal artwork exploring the ability of AI to articulate our most intimate thoughts and experiences. Del Pesco discusses the video, tells STIR,  “Dryhurst shot some home videos in the hospital, after Holly had just given birth. Their child Link was healthy and fine, but Holly fell into a coma for a week, following some complications. And so this video tells the story of the coma dream.”

The dreamlike video gives audiences a glimpse into a very difficult moment in the couple’s private lives and is guided by a voiceover featuring a conversation between Herndon and Dryhurst, where the former recounts the dream to the latter. While the series of home videos that engendered I’M HERE helped Dryhurst cope with Herndon’s coma, the outcome raises some interesting and troubling questions about the use and misuse of AI to reproduce what exists in our most private of spaces—our minds. Apophenia, Interruptions: Artists and Artificial Intelligence at Work is filled with compelling works, each of which takes a different approach to AI technology. Herndon and Dryhurst’s video is in both Centre Pompidou and KADIST’s collections, Baudelaire, Rui An and Harvey’s works were co-commissioned by the institutions, and Kurant and Interspecifics’ digital art pieces are on loan from the artists.

Apophenia, Interruptions is the second in a series of collaborations between KADIST and the Centre Pompidou, following the 2023 symposium The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be. The symposium featured presentations, conversations and video art screenings, focusing on the cultural movement that is growing at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence. This art exhibition builds on it by presenting us with the creative possibilities enabled by digital tools at this juncture.

‘Apophenia, Interruptions: Artists and Artificial Intelligence at Work’ is on view at the Centre Pompidou – Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, from September 25, 2024 – January 6, 2025.