Media artist Jukka Hautamäki deals with themes related to the future of visual arts: what kind of art will there be in the year 2050? Who makes it, for whom, and how will it be presented?
Restituo (lat.): restoring, reinstating, reinvesting, re-edifying. The synthesis of images, based on neural networks and artificial intelligence, is a seamless evolutionary process. I use, for example, selfies and synthetic faces of people who do not exist as training images for the AI.
On invisible information in an image: AI needs to be fed by various media archives, video, photographs, text, sound. Data is mined as raw material for AI's requirements. Our present era of (big) data has been described as a new neolithic era (Steyerl, McLuhan).
A digital, reproducible and inexhaustible virtual artist is probably a wet dream for neoliberal political idealists. A visual artist is, after all, a kind of product too, shaped by its environment: a facilitator of the arts? Visual art is thus gradually becoming like the entertainment industry. How can AI be used as a tool, a medium, for critical study of these phenomena?
Restituo I & II consists of over 700 + 700 curated GAN (generative adversarial network) images.