Gray Area brings AI commissions into the gallery

Gray Area’s Scaling Intelligence exhibition brings 11 newly commissioned AI artworks by 13 artists to San Francisco from 28 October to 1 November. Admission is free.[1]

The partnership with computing company Modal supplies artists with cloud credits, materials funding and cash stipends, alongside technical and exhibition support.[1]

Among the works, Spencer Chang’s Free Agents asks visitors to consider their relationship with AI systems, according to the organiser’s preview.[4]

Chang’s wider practice makes that question tangible. The artist builds interactive sculptures and internet spaces around everyday habits, play and care. Earlier work includes Computing Shrines, supported by a San Francisco Artist Grant for a public installation in Golden Gate Park, and playhtml, an open-source platform for making small internet spaces.[2]

That background offers a useful way into the exhibition: look for what a person can do with a work, and how another person’s participation changes it. An AI artwork can be judged through the encounter it creates as well as the image or text it produces.[2]

Another commissioned artist, Parag Mital, works with AI agents and simulated narrative worlds. In his broader practice, relationships, conflict and collective beliefs develop through interaction. His recent works include Conflicts and The Game of Whispers; he also founded The Garden in the Machine, a computational arts studio.[3]

Mital’s approach places authorship partly in the design of a situation: the characters, their relationships and the rules through which a story can develop. For an audience, that makes the system’s responses part of the material of the work. These are different artistic uses of AI, with different demands on a visitor’s attention.[3]

The exhibition is at 2665 Mission Street. Gray Area lists afternoon gallery hours through Sunday.[1]

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