Text by Jianru Wu
Emerging from Conceptual Art in the 1960s and Internet Art in the 1990s, a utopian vision emerged: intellectual property as a public resource, authors as both creators and audiences, and art seamlessly integrated into daily life. Within the last three years, as artificial intelligence has rapidly advanced, this utopian vision has become increasingly commonplace in the training of large language models by leading AI companies. Human-generated knowledge is being exhaustively fed into AI training, potentially for the foreseeable future. For artists, this presents a crisis of creativity in a traditional way: AI-generated text, images, and videos are becoming increasingly refined and indistinguishable from human-created content. Simultaneously, it marks a transformative moment, where the human as the sole creative subject is no longer a center point. Coexistence with machines has become the new manifesto for the next generation of artists.
Sol LeWitt famously wrote in his 1967 essay Paragraphs on Conceptual Art: ‘The idea itself, even if not made visual, is as much art as any finished product.’ If the Conceptual Art of the 1960s was about ‘the ideas as art-making mechanism,’ then today’s accelerated evolution of AI marks an era where ‘the machine as art-making mechanism.’ When prompts and machine instructions become as significant as visual language, creators must once again confront the age-old question of artistic language and the possibilities created by synthetic forces.
The PHOTOFAIRS Hong Kong digital sector, situated within the context of conceptual art, delves into the synthetic, conflicting, and collaborative relationships between artists and machines in digital media. Through its presentation of galleries, it showcases how digital art masters and contemporary avant-garde artists explore the human subject’s position in creation during the AI era, and comprehensively examines how contemporary digital media art responds to the issues of artistic language. Works range from net art, NFTs, to those co-created with advanced artificial intelligence.
'Coexistence with machines has become the new manifesto for the next generation of artists.'
Jianru Wu is a writer and curator based in Hong Kong. She was a curator at the Guangdong Times Museum and the founder of Media Lab (2019-2022), She has initiated a series of lectures and publications on art, philosophy, and technology. She is now a researcher for the Future Cinema Systems at Hong Kong Baptist University.
She co-edits the anthology Cybernetics for the 21st Century (Hanart Press, 2023); One Hand Clapping, exhibition publication at Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2018; Enlarged Intelligence, 2018, exhibition publication, Centre Georges-Pompidou & Chengdu. Her writings have appeared in Artforum International, Art Asia Pacific, The New York Times Life and Arts, Art Review Asia, among others. Wu received Asian Cultural Council fellowship in 2017, and Jane Farver Arts Foundation curator fellowship at International Studio & Curatorial Program (New York) in 2019. She is a member of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Advisory Board from 2020 to 2023.
PHOTOFAIRS Hong Kong will take place 26-30 March 2025 (VIP Preview March 26) at the Central Harbourfront.
