Metacreation Lab at Ars Electronica 2024
Autolume Exhibition
September 3-8, 2024, Linz, Austria
The Metacreation Lab for Creative AI took part in the prestigious Ars Electronica festival as part of the Campus Exhibition with four artworks.
Autolume
Small Data and Model Crafting
The ethics of Big Data and large foundational generative models is often questionable. Besides the obvious vampirisation of online data and artworks, they promote a particularly normative, yet biased, aesthetic.
In response to large prompt-based models, the Metacreation Lab created Autolume, a no-code system enabling artists to train their own AI models with their selected works. Autolume allows non-coders to craft, mix, and finetune their own generator, and manipulate in real time their many parameters to produce both still and animated outputs.
This exhibition presents a selection of four artworks resulting from collaborations practicing model crafting as a way to move forward without falling prey to the generic AI aesthetic of pre-trained large commercial models.
Longing + Forgetting
Longing + Forgetting explores pathfinding algorithms, as a metaphor to our personal and collective searches for solutions. Combining physical and algorithmic choreography, the work consists of a collection of artificial agent finding their way through the projection surface. How do we move forward, alone, and together, and what traces do our bodies leave behind us?
Artworks
Dreamscape
In response to AI-generated art using BIG DATA, the Metacreation Lab developed Autolume, a no-code system for artists to train AI models with their own works. This tool allows non-experts to create both still and animated outputs. In collaboration with Vancouver-based visual artist Erica Lapadat-Janzen, the latent space that abstracts the aesthetics of their work using Autolume was explored. The results are carefully crafted and selected stills and video loops, two of which are presented here.
Ensemble
This collection melds the traditional art of “siyah-mashq” in Persian calligraphy with AI model crafting. Each piece features generatively evolving and fluid calligraphic forms, accompanied by a background sonic texture. This piece explores unique aesthetics, inaccessible through large generic models, using Autolume's real-time transformation of static elements into moving displays, showcasing the coming together of classical artistry and modern technological innovations.
Autolume Mzton
Autolume Mzton explores the notion of birth using Autolume audio-reactive features. Driven by the piece Mzton, from the analog modular rhizome of the French band Robonom, the neural aesthetic of generative visuals unexpectedly evokes early experimental analog cinema. Themes of horizons, sunsets, and the vibrancy of the audio-visual coupling evoke utopian new beginnings.
