The image featured on the cover of this issue and entitled “Malala” was produced by the AICAN algorithm and was the leading artwork in the exhibition “Unhuman: Art in the Age of AI,”which took place in Los Angeles, California, and Frankfurt, Germany, in the fall of 2017. Created by Ahmed Elgammal, professor of computer science and director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University, AICAN is an algorithm that autonomously generates novel images with deep learning techniques. The algorithm was designed to answer the question, “If we teach a machine how to recognize art and styles of art, and then program it to create new images that do not follow established styles, what would it create?”

Featuring the materialization of 24 AICAN-produced images printed on unframed, metal sheets in two separate installments, “Unhuman” was the result of a selection of images from the digital constellation of visual content fabricated by the algorithm after its exposure to 80,000 digitized reproductions of paintings in Western art. The handpicked images in the exhibition and their presentation as art produced by a machine were intended to interrogate the role of artistic authorship, the concept of creativity, and the meaning of computer-generated art in the age of AI.

While the AICAN images are devoid of artistic intentionality in a direct sense, their ascribed titles, such as “Malala,” are intended to evoke a range of socio-political and conceptual associations in order to question their interpretive capacity. By far the most popular image in the exhibition, “Malala” gained its title in honor of Malala Yousofzai, the human rights activist from Pakistan, who survived being shot by the Taliban while standing up for women’s right to education. The image appears like a sanctified portrait or religious icon, noble, vivid, and strongly anchored in the foreground of the picture plane, making a direct appeal to its viewer despite its otherwise obfuscated rendering.

“Malala” and the other images produced by AICAN may be seen as the ultimate experiment in modernism, pushing the limits of the meaning of form itself, depending on where one locates the dividing line between human and machine agency in the creative act, if at all. At the core of “Unhuman” is an exploration of the role of boundaries in safekeeping those seemingly inimitable qualities that we consider the hallmarks of the human experience. To understand what is human and worth guarding as uniquely human, we ask the reader what is unhuman?

—Emily L. Spratt, Curator of “Unhuman: Art in the Age of AI”

and Chief Curator of the AICAN Art Collection

Spring 2018 | Volume 24, No. 3