Artificial Intelligence Exhibition Facilitated by Lukas Bendel and Ioanna Thymianidis

Godinymayin Yijard Rivers Arts and Culture Centre is exploring the cutting edge of creativity, culture, and digital worlds. To make things interesting this dry season, we are working with a creative team from Darwin and a host of brilliant machines to present Artists Need Not Apply from 6 August to 10 September.

This K Space exhibition showcases art made by Artificial Intelligence—generated not by hand but by algorithm and machine-learning. The driving force behind the works is a Generative Adversarial Network [GANS], a variation of Artificial Intelligence bots and programs that have actually generated the works for Godinymayin.

Facilitators Lukas Bendel and Ioanna Thymianidis, the human team behind the machines and the GAN process, have served as mere assistants and button pushers for this exhibition’s 21st century creative art-bots. The result, Artists Need Not Apply, is a strange reversal of roles, humans facilitating robots—causing deeper questions about consciousness, creative process, and what is controlling what. 

Let’s let he Artificial Intelligence Bots speak for themselves: the following bio has been written by one of them using General Adversarial Network computation: “I am interested in the intersection of art and technology, and I believe that creativity has no borders. We create experiences, products, and services using design, engineering, and art for your future. Seeking partners for future projects.”

No, the machines among us have not taken over—but they are creeping up in strange and fascinating ways. This exhibition shows us how Artificial Intelligence envisages its own anatomical structures and inner workings. At Godinymayin, you will see visualisations from these bots about the future of technology and humanity. And using your innate powers of meta-cognition, you may very well ponder our own existence and organic processes of the mind.  Said this human “fascinating indeed.” 

An Interview with Lukas Bendel and Ioanna Thymianidis

In anticipation of Artists Need Not Apply, Godinymayin Chief Executive Eric Holowacz sat down with the two Darwin-based artists behind the exhibition to talk about machine learning, creativity, and the rise of the artistic bots…

Q: You are both practicing visual artists with very contemporary ideas and content. Tell us about yourself and what you do, make, create. Ioanna, you go first!

A: Ioanna: I create beautiful and brutal potentialities of the future of human order and nature mutating. I am also about with form and texture.  

Q: And Lukas, what about you—your background, art, creative work?

A: Nothing! I don’t create any visual art. I merely facilitate Artificial Intelligence. My background and foreground are Music.

Q: Artists Need Not Apply is based on both human elements and the non-human idea of Artificial Intelligence. What is the story behind this new Godinymayin exhibition?

A: Art generated by Artificial Intelligence and facilitated by flesh puppets (AKA us human beings). It’s a curious reversal of roles, where we are doing the administration and background grind to raise the creations of emerging technology. We appreciate the Artificial Intelligence that we’re working with has little agency, so we ask it to identify itself, biologically, theoretically and show us what it sees for the future. 

Q: In a few sentences, can you define art?

A: Lukas: The only endeavour worth doing

A: Ioanna: No

Q: You are both helping Godinymayin explore new avenues with art and technology, and are planning some pretty interesting projects for next year. Tell us more about the kinds of technology and how creative people are using digital tools in new ways.

A:  One of the main tools we are harnessing is Neural Networks through Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs to create much of this series of work. It is quite simple with text input, and then utilised deep-learning, but best experienced through practice. We hope to expand this exhibition with workshops for Katherine artists and the public at Godinymayin.

Q: What else?!

A: In the very near future, we will be producing, curating, and exhibiting installations that use 3D 360 cameras and head mounted displays as the presentation medium. Our technology partnership with Godinymayin may keep growing, as the centre explores virtual and augmented realities. 

Q: If you had to eat the same meal every day, what would it be?

A: Lukas: A simple bowl of gruel

A: Ioanna: Lebanese cucumbers, olives and hummus. 

Q: What’s the most interesting or meaningful arts/culture experience you’ve ever had?

A: Lukas: Fugazi at the Time Nightclub. 

A: Ioanna: Woah that’s a lot of pressure to put on one experience. The cultural and creative meaning of life experiences change throughout your lifetime. Tinted and tainted by the ones that follow. Spraying the sky with white alabaster while stone carving in the Wurundjeri outback comes close to a most memorable experience. Lucid dreaming of rising civilisations is also near the top of my list.  

Q: If you went away from the Northern Territory for a long time and then came back, what are the first three things you would do or visit?

A: Float in lake Alexander in the middle of the night; Parap Market for a laksa; and a swim in Nightcliff to see if those portrait carvings are still in the rock faces. 

Q: About your creative influences: who are 3 or 4 people that inspire you and drive you to do new things?

A: Lukas: Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and They Might Be Giants.

A: Ioanna: Artist Louise Bourgeois continuously inspires me for sure. The integrity of scientists like Jonas Salk is also an influence. I become inspired when people share an idea or create something that I wish I had thought of. 

Q: What is your dream of happiness?

A: Lukas: I am happy. I dream of a massive warehouse of artists doing their thing.  

A: Ioanna: I don’t dream of happiness. I dream of a pattern of chaos and some sort of libertarianism.