Serendipity Arts Festival 2024 | Warming up to AI in Panjim

AI generated art in Deranged Life

Walking into the AI Minilab at the just-concluded Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, I was armed with prompts I was dying to ask ChatGPT. The first one: for the chatbot to create a piece of art from its imagination. Very reassuringly, the AI replied that it has no imagination of its own.

It is based, it told me, “on pattern recognition, learned relationships and algorithms… and though AI might be able to produce outcomes that surprise, inspire or resonate, the processes will always be based on human intelligence”.

When trepidation turned into fun

Mathieu Wothke, the founder of Somewhere Global, a Stockholm-based creative agency that focuses on culture and uses AI-generated art, put together the Minilab as a simple set-up — of six iPads equipped with ChatGPT. The role of accessibility clearly stood out. Visitors could engage in an interactive dialogue with the chatbot and share ideas that it transformed into vivid visuals. From ‘high tech Goa in 3025 with flying cars’ to ‘pink horses’.

Mathieu Wothke

Wothke found that while many walked in with some trepidation, they soon had fun making images, the young often showing the elders how to use it. But he tells me with a laugh that none was art. “There is this very interesting fine line of what’s art and what’s not. AI gives everyone the tools to do it, but that doesn’t mean all can do it.”

It brings to mind Refik Anadol, who is planning to open the world’s first AI arts museum, Dataland, in Los Angeles next year. The new media artist, whose interactive digital canvases showcase creations made from colossal datasets — from weather conditions to real-time data from the Amazon rainforest — insists that it is important for artists to build their own AI tools, so that they are co-creating with the machine.

At Serendipity, the last room of the installation highlighted this dichotomy, juxtaposing AI-generated visuals from novices with works crafted by seasoned artists. The differences reveal themselves in the intent, message, and emotional resonance. “It’s the vision, storytelling [and technique] that set art apart from mere production,” explains Wothke.

AI Minilab at the Serendipity Arts Festival

Disruptor, but not the enemy

AI-enhanced technologies and solutions are currently more widely available across industries. Concurrently, it is also pushing up AI anxiety. In the arts, news such as Marvel and Disney deciding to use an AI-generated animated intro for the show Secret Invasion earlier this year, is one of the many instances triggering fear among creatives.

Wothke acknowledges this and believes we could be just a couple of years away from AI dismantling the entire entertainment industry. “A few years from now, you could tell AI to create an entire movie according to your mood. For example, a thriller noir about a Swedish artist who comes to India for the first time and his existential journey,” he says with humorous self awareness. But that’s not to say human creativity will become irrelevant. Getting training and a deeper understanding of the tools available will help mitigate competition.

Visitors at the AI Minilab

Of course, questions of ethics come into play when the AI element used in the making of a piece is not disclosed. That wasn’t the case when I left the lab and stepped into another room at the event, saturated with morphing pastel coloured images — from dreamlike sea creatures to fluid, pulsating microscopic images of water — projected in high definition on the four walls. Set to psychotomimetic music, Deranged Life was a live performance using AI art. Seven visual artists created generative AI creatures in real time and even sketched live on Touchdesigner with added AI integration.

Deranged Life was a live performance using AI art

The performance was not just a celebration of art and technology, but also an exploration of the blurred boundaries between the natural and the synthetic, the human and the machine. It left me with hope that at least for now AI need not be feared as the monster in the room.

The writer and sound artist is based in Goa.