- Niceaunties, a Singapore-based designer and AI artist, who draws inspirations from the rich tapestry of her culture and explores themes of aging, personal freedom and everyday life through generative and digital art.

- Multi award-winning Sougwen 愫君 Chung, a Chinese-Canadian artist, who is widely regarded as a pioneer in human-machine collaboration. Recognised as one of TIME100’s esteemed AI innovators, their MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 2) piece has the distinction of being the first AI model acquired by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

- New York based artist Emily Xie harnesses algorithms to create life like textures and forms, navigating delicate balances between chance and control, and the abstract and representational. Her work has been showcased internationally, including at the Singapore ArtScience Museum and the Armory Show.

- Artist Elman Mansimov is a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Web, who is known for pioneering research in AI. His alignDRAW project, the first text- to-image model that marked a new era of human-machine collaboration, has been compared to the revolutionary impact of the first fixed photographs in the 1820s.

The exhibition is curated by Sunny Cheung, Curator - Design and Architecture at M+ Museum, Hong Kong. In his words:

I often think of this quote by Arthur C. Clarke who remarked that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The recent developments in artificial intelligence and generative art processes feel often to me, like a kind of magic. How else to explain what occurs when images appear phantom like, seemingly from nothing from a short literary description?

James Bridle coined the term “the new aesthetic” over a decade ago to talk about a tendency towards a new kind of visual manifestation in contemporary times. Bridle too, sensed a new beginning driven by computational logic, as a new visual aesthetic emerged driven by data flows, one where information was glitchy rather than “fuzzy”, where cartographic terrains and grids became new ways we saw the world. It was also a moment where computers generated types of images and backend systems which made sense only for themselves. Images which the “meat eyes” described by artist Trevor Paglen were not meant to see.

In this exhibition, all the artists create images which are derived from a variety of types of algorithmic processes ranging from machine learning, to human-robot collaborations. However, what is important is not that machines were involved at all (after all, humans have created art using tools since time immemorial) but more how artists have used these new digitally driven tools to create works which reflect, on both a conceptual and artistic level, new, faster and collaborative ways of producing. With the mass flows of data that is now collected, and a virtualisation of material, artists have become free to become a catalyst by which they can create new categories of meaning drawing upon a wealth of lived not merely sensed experience.

In this way, these artists, MK1 carbon based lifeforms augment these newer silicon based systems, training them to understand how we see and what we like, yet at the same time they influence our tastes, creating surprising images and experiences that are only possible with their assistance. Like all great relationships, we don’t necessarily know where it is heading, but we are excited by the new possibilities that come with new beginnings.