As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to infiltrate our daily lives, many artists theorise what the future might hold for humans and our progressively more autonomous AI counterparts. The Jut Art Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, has sought to address just this question. The museum also examines urban spaces and how they may shift in the future, particularly with AI. The museum’s ongoing art exhibition, The Future Life, Future You – Digital, Machine and Cyborgs, presents fascinating visions of the potential partnerships between humankind and AI. The exhibition is on view until January 28, 2024, and is curated by Bo-Cheng Shen, Visiting Assistant Professor and Art Critic of the Sculpture Department of the National Taiwan University of Arts. He joins STIR in an interview to discuss The Future Life, Future You.

The exhibition features 15 artists, including solo artists and collectives spanning the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany, Egypt, Spain, Mexico, and Taiwan: Aiden Faherty, Hassan Ragab, Jake Elwes, JIZAI ARMS project team, Mal Bueno, Markos Kay, Martin Backes, Moon Ribas, Patrick Tresset, Universal Everything, Yi Chen, Wan-Jen Chen, Simple noodle art (Zi-Yin Chen & Gotop Chuang), Newyellow and Hui-Yu Su. Their works combine contemporary art with facets of technology such as AI and deepfake generation, along with wearable devices, code art, cybernetics and more, to present imaginations surrounding future lifeforms.

The frame of reference espoused through the digital art exhibition is that AI is not a passive tool, but rather, an active collaborator with humanity, in the development of lifeforms and the systems that will support it. As the museum’s website states, “life” and “body” are terms that have become increasingly fluid, leading to the gradual acceptance of machines as a form of life. The Jut Art Museum’s position is that this acceptance has ushered in an era of interdependence between human beings and machines. Placing such great agency on machine intelligence is unprecedented, and is challenged by cautious commentators on the space, such as Wesley J. Smith, a major voice in bioethics. Smith distinguishes between the computational sophistication we associate with artificial intelligence, and the state of being “living,” or “sentient.” He contests that, whilst technologically superlative, artificial intelligence shall never truly be alive or mettlesome.

Shen assents to Smith’s perspective on bioethics while pointing out that, “AI, as a programmatic creation in the realm of bits and bytes, is not obligated to be human-like. The real question arises when this non-human programmatic creation exhibits the ability to communicate, interact, and perhaps even display emotions. How will humanity respond? Human nature isn't defined by demands placed on others but rather by our expectations. This perspective, valuing the idea that humanity exists in all things, can be observed in Shintoism in Japan. I believe this may be a highly significant attitude when confronting technological creations.”

Returning to The Future Life, Future You, the exhibiting artists are understandably bold in their imaginings of what the future could entail for humans and AI. Mal Bueno, for example, presents Final, a code artwork that seeks to place audiences inside a fully digitised world, where humans and machines coexist as equals. While Bueno’s work is exciting to experience, presently, there is a key issue preventing such a possibility: AI cannot as yet undergo a process comparable to cell replication, and therefore, machines require human intervention and the digital infrastructure to exist.

Taking up another set of concerns, the contemporary artist Jake Elwes’ video artwork, Zizi in Motion: A Deepfake Drag Utopia, seeks to queer datasets by using deepfake generating AI to replicate the movements of drag performer Wet Mess. AI creates Zizi, the performer in Elwes’ videos, but is unable to reproduce Wet Mess' movements exactly, causing fascinating glitches. Zizi is, effectively, an AI drag performer.

While Zizi may explore AI’s ability to learn from human input as well as its limitations, Elwes has highlighted its potential to learn purely from other AI through an earlier work, Closed Loop. This video installation displays a recording of two AI models in a never-ending conversation, without any input from Elwes. One displays an image, while the other attempts to describe it with words, leading to the former generating an image it believes best describes the words, and so on. Closed Loop is currently on display at the art museum and an important precedent as it challenges the assertion that AI lacks a reproductive process.

The work makes one wonder what would happen if AI’s capacity to learn from other AI were to be refined and applied to physical assembly. If AI were to fully operate a machine factory, would this constitute a new form of reproduction and evolution? Shen elaborates by referencing Kevin Kelly, Founding Executive Officer, Wired magazine, who advocates for technology to be viewed as the seventh kingdom in biology. He tells STIR, “There aren't new modes of evolution; instead, technology exhibits evolutionary features.” He believes that while technology cannot as yet self-reproduce, this is likely to become a reality soon. “Though,” he cautions, “It won’t equate to biological reproduction in the traditional sense.”

Towards the end of his interview with STIR, Shen acknowledges that technology certainly displays evolutionary characteristics, however terms such as "self-reproduction" and "optimisation" should be used in this space as aspects of tool production and refinement, rather than features of traditional biological evolution. With this in mind, The Future Life, Future You invites us not only to imagine bold futures for human beings and technology but to also broaden our understanding of reproduction, which itself is foundational to how we view life.