Two museum shows opened in February about art and technology that, combined, span the last seventy years and present some of the different discourses surrounding the convergence of these two fields. I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen, curated by Alison Hearst at The Modern Museum of Fort Worth presents nearly every contemporary medium from paintings and installations to games and face filters in an expansive exhibition of fifty artists across twelve sections touching on some of the major psycho-social outcomes of our mediated landscape. Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age 1952-1982, curated by Leslie Jones at LACMA includes prints, video, textiles and sculptural objects that admirably present a historical trajectory of artists’ experimentations with the possibilities of computational devices across those early years, when design limitations foregrounded composition and structure. Those constraints also contributed, occasionally, to a kind of didacticism, for which
Have you ever wondered what it would look like if Charles Darwin rode Napoleon's horse into battle against a dragon and its army of video game characters? Well, you could spend years - even decades - on artistic and design training to create the tableau yourself … or you could circumvent all that by using one of the many AI art generators that have become the subject of much public discussion recently.
Harold Cohen developed the first artificial intelligence "artist" in 1970, when AI was growing by leaps and bounds. He was a well-known painter in England and became fascinated with computer technology and what it could mean for the artistic world. He traveled to the University of California to lear