Will 2024 mark the year AI art went mainstream? Each year, the Frieze London Artist Award gives its winner the chance to debut an ambitious commission at the fair. This time, the spotlight was on Lawrence Lek. His playable game and hard-hitting video – though at five minutes, too long for the fleeting attention spans of most fairgoers – follows the absurdist story of an AI 'carebot' who wrestles with an uncanny kind of human self-doubt.
Ben Luke, host of The Art Newspaper’s podcasts and former Standard critic, describes Lek as "neither a blind evangelist nor a sceptic" of new technologies. It’s fitting, then, that his installation leaves you lingering somewhere between fascination and fear.
But, just a 15-minute drive to London's Hyde Park, and suddenly, the future of AI doesn’t seem so uncertain. Three days before Frieze, the Serpentine opened its doors to The Call, an exhibition by Herndon and Dryhurst that’s triggering new ways of thinking about AI – in art, culture and law.
For Herndon and Dryhurst, each step in their process – whether creating data (by recording songs with UK choirs), or training AI models (to generate new songs) – is a creative act with remarkable room for authorship and expression.
The duo even devised a “data trust” to distribute power among the choristers – a radical way to co-own data, and have a say in how it's used. It’s more than an exhibition, it’s a proposal for a better way forward for AI in art and beyond. So, when asked what he hoped its lasting message would be, Dryhurst said "submitting to processes larger than yourself is a beautiful act".
Sick of screen displays? The Call is filled with elaborate baroque objects instead. By singing – or, for the monotone among us – making a sound into a mic, you can interact with their AI as a chorus of voices will echo back. And it's not just the art world that's embraced it: plastered on the cover of the Autumn/Winter issue of AnOther Magazine is the digitally duplicated profile of Herndon, styled in Simone Rocha.
The V&A Museum's first Digital Art Season sparked even more buzz around data-driven art. Panels took place with artists like Anna Ridler that showed AI’s growing presence in the art world's most respected spaces, while a screening at the museum of a shimmering AI-generated video of whimsical marine life by Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo of Entangled Others Studio started yesterday.
And it doesn’t stop there. The Lumen Prize, a leading award for tech-powered art, gave its top honour to Theresa Reiwer last week. Like Lek, Theresa evokes a strange sense of empathy for her sentient AIs – hyper-realistic humanoids weighed down by biases inherited from the humans who built them.
A day later, Dana-Fiona Armour won The Sigg Art Foundation's first AI award, which even had an AI judge among its jury. Armour’s interactive video installation of a colossal pink snake slithering through a dystopian desert is a futuristic gut-punch: where will we fit in a world that’s no longer built for us?
Beyond museums and prizes, you can turn to the classic barometers of success: the auction houses. At Phillips, a dazzling data visualisation by Refik Anadol – the type that, for better or worse, has become iconic in shaping the public's view of AI art – and a real-time robotic painting installation by Sougwen Chung were on view throughout the week.
Sotheby's is currently presenting The Lumen Prize Anniversary Auction with AI works from Sasha Stiles, Botto, Casey Reas, and more, where bidding closes October 16th.
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As the memory of the frenzied 2021 NFT boom fades for some, these auctions are reminders that a vibrant world still operates in its wake, while an exhibition next month at Tate Modern, Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, will offer a fresh look at how we got here.
"At the start", Ridler says, "exhibitions were framed around spectacle – 'look a machine made this!'", but now there's more interest in the way an artist uses AI. It’s moved beyond novelty – it’s forcing us to rethink the future. And if you’re not tuned in, now is the time.
Phoebe Forster works at ARTXCODE, an artist agency and advisory specialising in algorithmic art. Lead image: Leon Chew, The Call, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst with sub, Serpentine, 2024.
10 AI Artists to know:
Anna Ridler
Artist and researcher exploring how technology shapes our understanding of the world. She is known for her ongoing explorations of Tulips to investigate value, ecology and time – but word on the block, Peonies are her next big thing.
Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst
Berlin-based artists known for their groundbreaking work in music, machine learning, and data empowerment. Since 2021, ArtReview has named them on their Power 100 list – an annual ranking of the most influential people in art.
Ian Cheng
Represented by Pilar Corrias, Cheng is a New York-based artist creating live simulations and stories to explore the nature of change. Recently he’s been exploring “art with a nervous system”, an AI creature that evolves over time.
Keiken
Keiken – meaning “experience” – is an artist collective co-founded in 2015 by Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori and Isabel Ramos. Through filmmaking, gaming, XR, and performance, they explore the nature of consciousness in radically transformed futures.
Linda Dounia
Dakar-based artist focusing on non-Western perspectives within the realm of AI-generated art. Recognised by Time magazine for her work on speculative archiving – building AI models that help us remember what is lost.
Mario Klingemann
Known for his pioneering work with machine learning, Klingemann has been a leading figure in AI art since 2015. His work Memories of Passersby I was the first autonomous AI machine to be successfully auctioned at Sotheby’s.
Sasha Stiles
What does it mean to be human in a nearly post-human era is the central question of Stiles’ work as a pioneering poet, language artist, and AI researcher. Earlier this year, she won the first-ever AI Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica, and has exhibited at Tottenham Court Road’s Outernet.
Sofia Crespo
Fascinated by biology and technology and how they intertwine, Crespo uses a combination of technical tools and images of the natural world to create intricate lifeforms. She was listed as one of the nine pioneering artists exploring AI by Artnet.
Sougwen Chung
This Chinese-Canadian artist uses robotics and AI to explore the relationship between humans and machine mark-making. She is represented by HOFA Gallery, and her work MEMORY was the first AI model to be collected by a major institution.
