“What does love look like? What does faith look like? Or ritual? Worship? What does God look like? These are very abstract, subjective concepts that don’t have clearly defined, objective visual representations. Could we teach a machine about these very subjectively human concepts?”
Memo Akten is not an AI artist. He would tell you that himself. The Turkish born, London based artist and creative technologist works with emerging technologies as both a medium and a subject matter, looking at its impact on us as individuals, as an extension of our mind and body and its impact on society, culture, ritual and tradition.
I viewed his latest work – Deep Meditations – at Sonar +D earlier this summer; as part of a collaboration project with contemporary hotel brand ME by Meliá. Inspired by a world that isn’t as black and white that we, as humans, sometimes perceive it to be, the hour long immersive film creates its own imagination of an artificial neural network trained on images labelled ‘everything’ from photo sharing website Flickr, in addition to other subjective concepts such as love, art, faith, nature, universe and cosmos, and then learns what our collective consciousness has decided what these look like.
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The results are fascinating. Combined with hours of religious and spiritual chants taken from YouTube, the incredibly diverse segments of data are not specifically distinguished to give the machine an idea of what is small or large, organic or human-made. What unfolds before your eyes is a world of self-reflection, inventing stories of what we’re led to believe.
As the images mould together and evolve, cities rise from flower beds, waves become mountain ranges, blood cells evolve into what appear to be distorted Victorian portraits.
We, as humans, tend to try and simplify things that we don’t understand in order to make it more digestible. This has its positives and negatives. Simplifying means easier digestion, which is good, but what happens when we have a disagreement with someone and we simplify our own views, and theirs, in order to create a suitable opposition image of our counterpart in our head?
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As Memo’s Deep Meditations is inspired by a world that is not so black and white, it is obvious that it must dip its toes into the political landscape. Hailing from Turkey, a country that has experienced and is still experiencing political unrest, and then moving to the UK, where Brexit and Boris loom large, Memo has implemented both as a source of inspiration within his work.
“It’s mostly the polarisation that I’m seeing around the world,” he tells me. “Obviously, there’s a increase in far right politics going on which, personally, is not my thing, so that’s worrying in itself, but I think what I’m reacting to more is the failure of the left. I see Brexit, I see Trump, as a failure of the left’s impact on the people that are choosing to vote that way.”
“I’m sure there are a lot of people that vote Brexit or vote for Trump out of other frustrations, not just for the core racist views that are publicised. I feel it’s the left’s failure responsibility to identify that, and now that we’re in the situation that we are, turning our back on fifty percent of the population is not productive. That’s where my frustrations lie right now. How can I and my peer group turn this around?”
Memo is disturbed by the views of other remainers who see the current UK political climate a little too black and white. Refusing to acknowledge that there may be other factors as to why someone may have voted leave, apart from racism and stupidity. If we refuse to accept that then a discussion can never take place, and that only makes the divide greater.
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My next question is inspired by a show I watched on BBC Four called Revolutions: The Ideas That Changed The World. This particular episode was on robots and artificial intelligence. The narrator informed that if we are to have robots in our homes one day – taking care of our children, doing day to day tasks, being a firm and essential part of futuristic everyday life – then they must obey. Science Fiction, although fiction, has always been very good at predicting what might come next, and I’ve read enough science fiction where artificial intelligence renders the human race useless and proceeds to drive us into extinction to know that the sword, more often than not, is double edged.
Although Memo denies himself as an AI artist, is he worried that one day that the lines between this technology and art will become so blurred that it could be projected to push something negative and harmful?
“I’m using technology; I’ve made contributions to that technology,” he says. “Technology can be misused. It’s surveillance being developed for unethical reasons. AI, today, is a technology that is being funded by Google, Facebook… These are the people funding it. They’re funding it to make sense of the data they collect from us. Already it’s unethical. I think that’s part of the debate also. Artists discussing what we can do to stop these technologies being used in harmful ways.”
“I do believe AI will bring great benefits. If we’re ever going to cure leukaemia, it’s going to be with the help of machine learning. On the other hand, privacy is going to disappear completely.”
Deep Meditations beauty lies not within what is happening on screen (although that is also incredibly beautiful) but what is happening within our own heads. Its beauty is within its subtlety and introspection; in making us recognise that we need to consciously let go of the restraints and memories of our own experiences when discovering something new and subjective. To quote Memo once more, “we must learn to see things as they are, not as we are.”
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Words: Andrew Moore
