<i>Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms</i> at the Toledo Museum of Art

When I entered the exhibition Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms at the Toledo Museum of Art, I was immediately immersed in a corridor of mirrors that both multiplied my reflection and superimposed my presence into the futurity of image-making. In keeping with contemporary art historical scholarship that underscores the value of human contributions in the creation of media generated by artificial intelligence (AI), the parallel mirrored walls that welcomed me into the gallery space became physical and philosophical reminders that humans—including viewers—remain important collaborative agents in the making, curation, and reception of digital and computational art.Organized into five chapters—The Imaginary Machine; Coded Nature; Digital Materiality; Reading Human Unreadable; and Chance and Control—the multimedia group exhibition, curated by Julia Kaganskiy, offered a chronological investigation into the aesthetics, mechanics, and materiality of digital and computational art. Today, the presence of AI-generated content, regardless of its manifestation, has become impossible to ignore or disregard for algorithmic information is physically and virtually everywhere. But never did this exhibition pretend to stage technology as the sole author of a work of art; instead, Infinite Images staged AI technologies in modern and contemporary art as agents working in collaboration with the human body.The presence of human touch and human configuration was sprinkled throughout the exhibition. For example, in Vera Molnár’s series of drawings titled Histoire d’I (1968), the Hungarian artist, a celebrated pioneer in digital drawing and algorithmic art, materialized time as evidence of her engagement with and technological contributions to modern art. Using computers and plotting machines, Molnár transformed the process of drawing into one that deployed algorithms to create both preconceived and random lines using digital pattern-making technologies. The results are seas of regulated, yet non-regulated black, blue, and red ink lines plotted on Benson paper that recall the movement of the machine, the space of computational timing, and the fragility of the algorithm. Unlike traditional definitions of drawing that focus on marks made by a human hand, Molnár’s computational drawings instead ask viewers to contemplate drawing as a dialogue between materiality, process, and image as well as a collaborative engagement between the artist and the machine. Similar to British anthropologist Tim Ingold who argues that drawing lines is a collaborative process entangling human mark-making, materiality, and technology, Molnár’s drawings exemplify the ways in which humans can work with computer-generated algorithms to conceptualize and co-produce an image.1In Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler’s 83 Seeds from a Vanishing Mountain (2023), there is evidence that human and nonhuman contributions come together to co-conceptualize and co-manifest images—all the while challenging the aliveness of technology. Organized into a gridded color photograph constructed via Photoshop, or what Kaganskiy, in the work’s exhibition label, describes as a “digital collage”2 depicting eighty-three plant species native to the Swiss Alps, it is the work’s incorporation of data visualization and digital screens that recall the presence of human touch. On each screen, the artists deployed generative adversarial networks (GANs)—machine learning frameworks used for generative modeling—to digitally foreshadow the future states of some of the plant species depicted in the work of art. Unlike the twenty-two still, colored images that make up the majority of the work, the three screens methodically positioned on the grid uniquely perform the aging process of each depicted species: moving slowly through time, each screen portrays flowers as they age, wilt, and eventually decay. Recalling the act of aging, regardless of what or who is aging, Crespo and Ridler appropriated the performative nature of time to digitally frame what is characteristic of human nature—the embodied experience of life and death. However, with assistance from computational technologies, theirs oscillates between states of living and dying placing their digital performativity into an infinite loop that trivializes the nature of time.Building on the ways in which data visualization as a computational aesthetic can alter the chronology and depiction of time, William Mapan’s works Distance #196 (2023), Distance #197 (2023), and Distance #198 (2023), presented in a vertical format, program and translate code to alter real-time images of place. Originally intended to be a visual translation of Paul Klee’s block-like watercolors about the artist’s travels across the city of Kairouan, Tunisia, Mapan deployed algorithms and codes to push the boundaries of human experience. Although using computational technologies to create and perform an aesthetic response to place, Mapan wove into the fabric of each piece the element of subjectivity. By entangling personal experience into the aesthetics and materiality of the work, he created aerial views of place that each recall the ways in which time and distance can transform one’s perception of place.In keeping with British artist Susan Collins, who deployed data visualization as a method for surveillance on the land more than a decade ago, Mapan’s painterly digital collages highlight how subjectivity and human perception have an inherent ability to instigate perpetual change as well as challenge the construct of assumed reality. While Collins’s online project Fenlandia (2004–06) translated webcam images of Cambridgeshire’s landscape into pixilated abstract and nonspecific fields of color in constant flux, Mapan’s works marry code, algorithms, and painterly processes to contemplate the precarity of picturing real space in real time. The end result, the Distance series, resembles a deconstructed geometric abstract painting that reminds viewers that images recorded via surveillance are in fact fabricated images based on subjective and experiential perceptions of reality, rather than locational truth.As I turned a final corner in the gallery and engaged with the last work of art in the exhibition, I experienced a creative and thought-provoking full-circle moment. I was once again immersed in the mirrored entry corridor that had welcomed me into the gallery earlier. Although I had just experienced many powerful examples of AI-generated artwork that begged the question of creative authorship in the context of an art exhibition, I was reminded upon seeing my reflection that humans, human presence, and subsequently human contributions could never be discounted in the creation and curation of digital and computational art. For this reason, Infinite Images staged an important message—that humans too are active agents and authors in the production and presentation of AI-generated art.