HAShile our era is characterized by humanity’s disproportionate influence on the planet, we ourselves are going through a period of profound change. Increasingly, machines are performing tasks that only humans could do, and many of these tasks require creativity.
Far from being a distant theoretical possibility, artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived – and it is here to stay. Considering its potential, it is tempting to embrace the technological optimism of the 1990s, when Deep Blue (IBM’s computer), in 1997, defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
This event sparked interest across many disciplines in how AI could be deployed and commercialized in other areas. But it is tempting to take the opposite view by pointing out that AI could become an intolerable threat to jobs, or even threaten humanity itself.
These two reactions are nothing new, they often accompany the appearance of major innovations. They are tainted by the same error: considering technical progress as if it were a factor that escapes us. Today, optimists are primarily interested in what AI can do for us, while pessimists worry about what it will do to us. Now the question is what we will do with AI.
Dialogue between experimentation and tradition
This question is as relevant to the fine arts as it is to finance, despite the apparent differences between these areas of essentially human activity. We better understand new media art if we consider it as a dialogue between experimentation and tradition.
Human aspiration for novelty and tradition are dependent on each other: it is through knowledge of what preceded a work of art that we can understand how it innovates. No work is totally independent of the past, just as we cannot understand light in the absence of darkness.
Generative AI is also based on the interaction between the past and the present. By drawing on the past of human expression – large databases – it can have near-universal applications and facilitate innovation in many areas of culture and industry. This approach to AI led us to continue our collaborative project Dvorak Dreams.
In this context, we used the power of machine learning to transform the compositions, visual archives and legacy of Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904), the famous Czech composer, into a 100-meter installation squares. It was exhibited in September 2023 in Prague during the annual Dvorak festival in front of the Rudolfinum concert hall, a building listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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