Alexander Reben - CiAo (code in, art out) SERIES
From our exclusive online exhibition ‘Game of Life – Emergence in Generative Art’ curated by Jason Bailey we are glad to introduce today one of the four artists featured: Alexander Reben.
Alexander Reben’s work probes the inherently human nature of the artificial. Using tools such as artificial philosophy, synthetic psychology, perceptual manipulation and technological magic, he brings to light our inseparable evolutionary entanglement to invention which has unarguably shaped our way of being. This is done to not only help understand who we are, but to consider who we will become in our continued codevelopment with our artificial creations.
For artists, cellular automata like Game of Life can inspire them to improvise on these systems or to model emergent systems of their own, rivaling nature in their complexity, beauty, and surprise.
As Reben shares: “Conway's Game of Life is more like half psychology and half math. We, as humans, are interpreting the actions of these pixels as having agency of some sort. We are picturing them as alive. Algorithms are only part of it. It is a human algorithm because it is our interpretation of what it is doing. I think that also plugs into viewing art. A lot of art is about how we interpret it in our own context. I bet a dog would interpret Conway's Game of Life differently than we do.”
For the show ‘Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art’ Reben has prepared a specially programmed interactive gallery page to view his new CiAo (code in, art out) series.
“High-level computer code is a representational language of mathematical logic from which seemingly infinite complexity can arise. Stemming from the most basic logic of 1 and 0, on and off, true and false, code’s purpose is to abstract fundamental digital operations into a human-readable and understandable form by leveraging the conventions of language and mathematics. The complexity which arises out of simple rules weaved together creates beauty from this conceptual yet constrained instruction set, much as how nature makes grand structures from numerous discrete units within the bounds of physics.
CiAo (code in, art out) is a series of artworks which explore the magnificent complexity of code arising from simple rules, by not only exhibiting the resultant rendering, but also by including the usually concealed generative code itself as part of the aesthetic object. These works also explore questions surrounding digital artwork such as: ownership, modern copyright and authorship, sharing and decentralized networks, blockchain and cryptographic authenticness, the archival (or conversely, disposable) nature of digital and intangible works, editions within generations of outputs and artistic control of aesthetic output.”
Selected artworks in the gallery are available to collectors on KVG website as beautiful prints and now also as unique NFT on the blockchain on SuperRare.
Below we invite you to watch the Harvard lecture where the artist is accurately talking about the CiAo series.
Forbes recently featured an article about Alexander Reben’s new GPT-3 AI series which you can read here.
We will dive much deeper into Reben's fascinating work and share our full interview with the artist in the coming weeks.
Stay tuned!
Kamanthia Dorios
AI generated faces, named by an AI and generated in part by parameters influenced by the artist's brainwaves, gaze and/or body signals.
Model by Joel Simon & artbreeder. AR by Artivive.
AR work, edition of 55 physical cards 5’’x5’’ inches each (12.7 x12.7cm), signed.
Scan with the https://artivive.com/ app to show the AR video on top of the image.
This work was featured at Ars Electronica Festival 2019.