A Robot Will Spark the Next Avant-Garde

­­“An illegal theme park exposing the ideology of the aesthetics of hacking”. “A hybrid drone targeting technological domination”. “A psychedelic fridge to raise doubt about fake news”. Do these quotes sound artificial to you? Not so strange, since they are generated by an artificial intelligence. Predictive Art Bot is one of the many tweeting bots on the Internet. It is an algorithm that generates random combinations of recent headlines of online articles and publishes new non-human expressions of potential artistic concepts on Twitter. This results in funny, strange, alien and random headlines.

Predictive Art Bot was created by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska. For the exhibition Alien Matter, Predictive Art Bot reveals itself in a physical installation. The sentences produced by Predictive Art Bot light up on ventilators, creating a catchy and volatile image of continuously changing art forecasts.

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Some of the sentences are new concepts for artistic projects, others prophesize bizarre future directions for art. Predictive Art Bot is a call for artists to create new works based on AI-generated concepts; human art based on non-human concepts. Today, algorithms are everywhere: they are used to analyze, predict and influence our consumer behavior and global market trends, they decide what to show up on our newsfeeds, and predict our future friends. So why not use them in art as well?

Predictive Art Bot creates art forecasts that are meant to expand the limited human imagination with new, nonhuman perspectives. As explained in the exhibition catalogue: “The concept producing the most resonance on Twitter has been realized for “alien matter”. As a parody of transhumanist prophecies, the Predictive Art Bot liberates artists from the constraints of creativity and develops ideas not yet implemented or conceived of by humans”.

In search for inspiration? Follow @predartbot on Twitter! Because “the next avant-garde will be sparked by a robot!”.

Predictive Art Bot was part of the exhibition Alien Matter, curated by Inke Arns, on show at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin from 2 February - 5 March 2017.

Source: Artbot.space, Transmediale

Image: Transmediale, We Make Money not Art