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MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE: ART MEETS AI
Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the author
of Ways of Curating and Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects.

In the Introduction to the second edition of his book Understanding Media, Marshall
McLuhan noted the ability of art to “anticipate future social and technological
developments.” Art is “an early alarm system,” pointing us to new developments in
times ahead and allowing us “to prepare to cope with them. . . . Art as a radar
environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training. . . .”
In 1964, when McLuhan’s book was first published, the artist Nam June Paik was
just building his Robot K-456 to experiment with the technologies that subsequently
would start to influence society. He had worked with television earlier, challenging its
usual passive consumption by the viewer, and later made art with global live-satellite
broadcasts, using the new media less for entertainment than to point us to their poetic and
intercultural capacities (which are still mostly unused today). The Paiks of our time, of
course, are now working with the Internet, digital images, and artificial intelligence.
Their works and thoughts, again, are an early alarm system for the developments ahead of
us.
As a curator, my daily work is to bring together different works of art and connect
different cultures. Since the early 1990s, I have also been organizing conversations and
meetings with practitioners from different disciplines, in order to go beyond the general
reluctance to pool knowledge. Since I was interested in hearing what artists have to say
about artificial intelligence, I recently organized several conversations between artists
and engineers.
The reason to look closely at AI is that two of the most important questions of
today are “How capable will AI become?” and “What dangers may arise from it?” Its
early applications already influence our everyday lives in ways that are more or less
recognizable. There is an increasing impact on many aspects of our society, but whether
this might be, in general, beneficial or malign is still uncertain.
Many contemporary artists are following these developments closely. They are
articulating various doubts about the promises of AI and reminding us not to associate the
term “artificial intelligence” solely with positive outcomes. To the current discussions of
AI, the artists contribute their specific perspectives and notably their focus on questions
of image making, creativity, and the use of programming as artistic tools.
The deep connections between science and art had already been noted by the late
Heinz von Foerster, one of the architects of cybernetics, who worked with Norbert
Wiener from the mid-1940s and in the 1960s founded the field of second-order
cybernetics, in which the observer is understood as part of the system itself and not an
external entity. I knew von Foerster well, and in one of our many conversations, he
offered his views on the relation between art and science:

I’ve always perceived art and science as complementary fields. One shouldn’t
forget that a scientist is in some respects also an artist. He invents a new
technique and he describes it. He uses language like a poet, or the author of a
detective novel, and describes his findings. In my view, a scientist must work in

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