Davide Balula at galerie frank elbaz | Paris
Just a few weeks in the past, a Tumblresque collage of an astronaut driving a horse made the rounds on the web. Apart from just a few small glitches—a second hoof on one of many legs and an uncharacteristically bushy tail—there have been no seen indicators that this image had been created by the latest model of DALL-E, an artificial-intelligence interface that generates photographs primarily based on written inputs from customers. Amid the joy over the potential for utilizing pure language processing to supply reasonable photographs, there was an undercurrent of unease about this system’s notional capabilities.
That trepidation is on the core of “Some farmed, others mined,” Davide Balula’s most up-to-date exhibition, at the moment on view at Galerie Frank Elbaz. For A.I. Generated Directions, 2022, Balula fed a machine-learning system picks from his personal oeuvre and had it create a collection of directions for brand new works, which he then executed within the gallery. The outcomes are equal elements uncanny valley and Fluxus. Like DALL-E and its glitchy horse, Balula’s AI is unable to totally course of summary language, main it to spit out garbled instructions similar to “domesticate the closest wall with potato chips till the time runs out of flowers.”
For the accompanying “Farmed Work,” 2020–21, Balula uncovered a collection of canvases to natural matter and allowed them to climate and decay, spawning a community of microorganisms that act as coauthors, not in contrast to the AI. By ceding management, Balula reveals the pure order and innate inconsistencies of those intractable forces.
— Jonah Goldman Kay
