Exhibition at Barbican Centre explores capabilities of artificial intelligence

On view from May 16 to August 26, 2019, the Barbican Centre, London, presents a new exhibition: AI: More than Human. It has been curated by Barbican International enterprises and co-produced with Groninger Forum.

The exhibition invites viewers to explore our relationship with artificial intelligence (AI). This major centre-wide ‘festival-style’ exhibition explores creative and scientific developments in AI, demonstrating its potential to revolutionise our lives. Bringing together artists, scientists and researchers, this interactive exhibition offers an unprecedented survey of AI with which the viewer is invited to engage head-on.

AI: More than Human demonstrates the rapidly evolving story of AI, starting from its roots in Japanese Shintoism and Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage’s early experiments in computing, to AI’s major developmental leaps from the 1940s to the present day to show how an age-old dream of creating intelligence has become today’s reality. The exhibition includes research and technology projects from the likes of DeepMind, Jigsaw, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL), IBM, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Google Arts and Culture, Google PAIR, Affectiva, Lichtman Lab at Harvard, Eyewire, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wyss Institute and Emulate Inc.

This project brings together artists, researchers and scientists on one platform, displaying commissions and projects by Memo Akten, Joy Buolamwini, Certain Measures (Andrew Witt and Tobias Nolte), Es Devlin, Stephanie Dinkins, Justine Emard, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Stefan Hurtig and Detlef Weitz, Hiroshi Ishiguro and Takashi Ikegami, Mario Klingemann, Kode 9, Lawrence Lek, Daito Manabe and Yukiyasu Kamitani, Massive Attack and Mick Grierson, Lauren McCarthy, Yoichi Ochiai, Neri Oxman, Qosmo, Anna Ridler, Chris Salter in collaboration with Sofian Audry, Takashi Ikegami, Alexandre Saunier and Thomas Spier, Sam Twidale and Marija Avramovic, Yuri Suzuki, teamLab and Universal Everything.

The exhibition is divided into four sections - The Dream of AI, Mind Machines, Data Worlds, and Endless Evolution - altogether presenting a chronological account of the development of AI, and how it increasingly impacts our very existence while also presenting a glimpse of what lies ahead. While the image of a humanoid seems to be sprawled across campaigns by tech companies and every second movie that is made belongs to the sci-fi genre, the exhibition with its interactive paintings, robot installations and plethora of gadgets leaves the viewer confused, questioning his or her very identity and its subsequent future. The exhibition then forces one to contemplate what it would mean to be human in the future, what is consciousness and whether the latter is what will separate a human from a humanoid.

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