New art exhibition: humanity in the age of AI

With computer-generated landscapes of Chinese temples and otherworldly jungles, and through ethereal electronic music and philosophical dialogues, artist Lawrence Lek depicts a future where machines have acquired humanlike intelligence — and humans have grown machinelike in their aesthetic consumption. For most of the 20th century, the human-machine relationship has been represented through the figure of a humanoid robot, a persistent trope that is associated with "uncanny valley", a term coined in 1970 by a Japanese engineer, said Claudia Schmuckli, the curator of the exhibition. "One of the questions that this exhibition is asking is whether it's time to define a new visual vocabulary to describe this relationship between humans and machines," said Schmuckli, who is curator of contemporary art and programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The painting continuously changes color patterns in response to algorithmic sentiment analysis of social media feeds, as the computer coverts the "collective social energy", in the form of tweets, posts and online searches, into physical heat energy. "The show looks at both the philosophical and political stakes of the increasing integration of AI into every aspect of our daily lives," said Schmuckli.