Symbiosis: Art in the Age of AI

The exhibition presents a gamut of international artists who work with artificial intelligence in various ways, exploring a wide range of possibilities offered by this latest technological development

Lev Manovich. Drawing Rooms, 2023. Digital images created with Generative AI and edited in Lightroom Print. L85 cm (33.5 in). © the artist.

The Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery, New York
23 January – 29 March 2025

by NATASHA KURCHANOVA

For better or worse, artificial intelligence is here to stay. Once we accept this premise, the idea of art made with the help of AI does not appear outlandish. It makes us think of “the better”, collaborative side of AI, rather than fear its “worst” aspects, which can intuitively appear machine-like and, by implication, impersonal. The exhibition’s strength consists in challenging such binary thinking about AI, presenting a cross-section of international artists who work with it in various ways, exploring a wide range of possibilities offered by this latest technological development. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “symbiosis” as “the living together in more or less intimate association or close union of two dissimilar organisms”. The “dissimilar” organisms, are, of course, us, the humans, and the invention of our minds, the machine. This union can be mutually beneficial or not, in one way or another. This exhibition probes the ways AI can enter our daily and creative lives, particularly in visual and sound arts. 

Curated by Alexandra Dementieva, a multimedia artist based in Brussels, and Odelette Cho, the director and curator at the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery, the exhibition presents the work of eight artists who live and work in Belgium, Korea, England and the United States – effectively representing a broad spectrum of international artists who in varying degrees have made AI part of their practice. The exhibition is smartly curated: it is selective, including artists who are known for their pioneering approach to working with technology, and it is comprehensive, as far as is possible in a small gallery space, presenting viewers with a wide spectrum of possibilities of artistic approaches to working with AI. Another remarkable fact about this group of artists is that they were born between the early 1960s and late 70s, representing baby boomers and gen X, who have continued the work begun in the 60s by Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT). Having gone through multiple stages in their careers, they developed an interest in technology early on in this process. For many of them, working with AI is the logical next step in integrating technology into their work. But they are all different people with different histories and interests that inform their work.

Alexandra Dementieva. Mini-Totem, 2022-25. Photoprint on aluminium, 70 x 50 cm (27.5 x 19.7 in). © the artist.

Dementieva and Lev Manovich, an artist and an influential digital culture theorist who has written several books on new media, software and AI aesthetics, were both born in 1960 in Moscow. They bring a sensibility that is deeply rooted in the Russian and international avant garde of the 20th century, but they think about art and use technology in their works in very different ways. For Dementieva, art is a poetic endeavour. Working primarily in multimedia installation, she seeks empathic connection, understanding and union with the viewers, creating interactive environments, where viewers and the work find one another through this encounter. She sees AI as a tool to process “a collective, distorted and deconstructed output of pre-existing knowledge and beliefs”, which artists can use “to generate broader conversations on lost histories, cultural narratives and universalities of human experience”. For her, these lost histories include the legacy of the Russian avant garde, especially its connection to cosmism, an intellectual movement inspired by the teachings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and guided by ideas concerning exploration of the cosmos and interplanetary travel.

Alexandra Dementieva. Mini-Totems, 2022-25. 3D modeling sculptures, H26 cm and 30 cm (10 and 11.8 in). © the artist.

In this exhibition, Dementieva is showing two works – one consisting of two large photographic prints and four small sculptures called Mini-Totems and the other comprising a series of three videos, Our Portraits. Mini Totems are Dementieva’s visualisation of what a totem of our time may look like. Similar to totems of the past, they are phallic in shape, but have sleek, metal, rocket-shaped bodies. Because they are made with the help of AI, there are multiple variations of these totems, of which the artist chose six – two are printed in two dimensions, as photographs, and the other four are also printed, but in three dimensions. The sculptures are uncanny creations that look like mutants of kitchen utensils and African sculptures, surrealistically combining elements of our everyday lives and symbolic representations of larger-than life mythical powers. Their tiny size makes them appear like disposable toys, but blown up in large-scale photographs, they present as imposing and powerful mechanical creatures having a potential to live their own lives.

Alexandra Dementieva. Still image from the video Our Portraits, 2023. Duration 4 mins. © the artist.

The videos, by contrast, present AI variations of the artist’s fascination with tardigrades, tiny animals that look like mini-snails encased in their armour. These minuscule creatures drew the artist’s attention because they are arguably among the most resilient creatures on the planet, capable of surviving extreme temperatures, pressures, starvation and dehydration. If anything on our planet could survive a global nuclear catastrophe, it would most likely be a tardigrade. In Our Portraits, AI is following directions given by Dementieva and presents us with variations of tardigrades in a garden of apples or a tardigrade as an astronaut, or in some sort of a close relationship with a beautiful woman. It is hypnotising to watch these videos in which the image is saturated with the pixelated glow of the screen and where, every few seconds, the program slightly alters the representation to end up with a very abstracted image of the “original” variation. Works by Dementieva invite us to think about our history and culture, and what it may mean to be human in the age of AI.

Lev Manovich. Drawing Rooms, 2023. Digital images created with Generative AI and edited in Lightroom Print. L85 cm (33.5 in). © the artist.

If Dementieva is developing the cosmological tradition of the avant garde, Manovich is interested in the revolutionary innovation of the visual arts’ formal language. In the artists’ talk accompanying the exhibition, he explained that the series of six digital images, Drawing Room, included in the show, is important to him, because it reflects his traditional training in visual art when he was growing up in Moscow. His art teacher admired the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, and Morandi remains Manovich’s favourite painter. When we think of the monochrome, minimalistic compositions of Morandi’s work and Manovich’s busy, intricate backgrounds, they seem to have little in common. However, Morandi’s influence is evident in the subdued colour scheme and in the intention of stripping bare the representational power of painting. What it represented did not matter as much, if painting as a medium was revealed.

Manovich does the same for the AI. As he explains on his website, the formal logic of “generative AI” is fragmentation itself. Manovich traces the genesis of this logic to Paul Baran, one of the founding fathers of computer science, who in the late 1950s discovered the guiding principle of the internet – that breaking messages into random parts facilitated their transmission. Fragmentation of knowledge (science, culture) and then processing this knowledge in stages allows AI to learn and produce various kinds of knowledge required of it. The “busy”, fragmented state of Manovich’s Drawing Room, then, is a metaphor for this fragmentation process, which is also a generative process of AI. Manovich says: “Perhaps, in these images, AI medium wants to reveal itself to us – to remind us that the seeming materiality of synthesised scenes is illusionary and fleeting, and behind it [is the] endless debris of human cultural history.”

William Latham. Infinity Gothic Mutator, 2022. Two mutator A-Life Videos, AI and 3D physics. © the artist.

William Latham (b1961), a pioneering computer artist from the UK, has been working on developing the concept of computer art since the 80s. In his interviews and writing, he describes this art as self-generative, having the power to create its own forms. In a conversation with the author Jim McClellan in 1995, Latham called a computer screen a “gateway into another domain”, comparing it to the exploration of the cosmos. While interplanetary space exists independently of our human world and presents great practical challenges for our attempts to “conquer” or even explore it, computer space is arguably as limitless, but being a human creation, offers more practical possibilities for exploration.

Beginning with this very practical premise, Latham and his team of programmers and mathematicians, including his long-time collaborator Stephen Todd, developed a system of generating organic-looking forms through a computer program known as Mutator. Latham begins the process of creating a form from a shape he likes, which he feeds into the program, and then generates a certain mutation of the original form, after it has been transformed with the help of FormGrow, a “computer grammar” that allows for a certain “organicity” to emerge as a result of the process. The idea of nature and organicity is important to Latham. He always wants to stay as close to the object and possible, leaving abstraction behind. In this, he differs from Manovich, Dementieva and the dreamlands of the Russian avant garde, always remaining closely tied to the object-oriented British aesthetics. However abstract-looking his images are, they depict a concrete, closeup process generation of synthetic bio-mechanical forms. In the two videos and a print comprising the work Infinity Gothic Mutator, multiple rounded shapes and organic-looking forms fill the surface of the images. Latham describes them, metaphorically, as “mutation-generated forms breaking free from their structural constraints and heading toward chaos”; “worm-like forms gaining emergent behaviours as they search for empty space to move to and compete against each other.” These metaphors of struggle, competition and growth point in the direction of Charles Darwin’s teachings about evolution and suggest his influence on Latham’s desire to marry biological and artificial entities. Even though far away from the dreamy tardigrades of Dementieva, the computerised digital materiality of the image is as visually mesmerising.

Koen Theys. Pablo Picasso with his Twin Brother in the Studio, 2024. Pigment ink on archival paper, 180 x 178.5 cm (70.8 x 70.2 in). © the artist.

Koen Theys (b1963, Brussels) was one of the first artists in Belgium to work with video. For him, AI is just another technological medium to explore and incorporate into his art. His two works here, Pablo Picasso with his Twin Brother in the Studio and Participatory Art with Frustrated White Cis-Males, are whimsical and humorous. The tasks given to the AI in both cases are hypothetical – obviously, Picasso did not have a twin, and there are thousands of variations of what a participatory art with frustrated white cis-males might look like.

Koen Theys. Pablo Picasso with his Twin Brother in the Studio, 2024 (detail). Pigment ink on archival paper, 180 x 178.5 cm (70.8 x 70.2 in). © the artist.

They are also tongue-in-cheek: AI is a kind of technology that should be perfect in creating the exact copy of the original, but it is an interesting experiment to have it come up with an image of a hypothetical twin. The 12 variations of Picasso “twins” generated by AI seem to be all different, but also strangely the same. We see the “brothers” engaged in various art-related activities – painting, sculpting, drawing – and in some pictures one of them appears half-naked or in a form of a statue, or with a weirdly twisted hand. There is some entertainment value in the variety of positions and environments generated by AI, but their strange sameness – down to the deadpan expressions on their faces – is unreal and somewhat disturbing. This periodic repetition and complete lack of any sign of life betrays the artificiality of the image and makes us smile at the awkwardness of the machine’s attempt to create something that could only be imagined. 

Anna Frants. Amable, 2020-25. Media installation. Animation, programming, real-time webcams located around the globe, neural network. © the artist.

Anna Frants and Petermfriess, both born in 1965, the former in Leningrad, the latter in Munich, use AI to demonstrate its possibilities for recording and making the world in which we live more manageable. Frants named her work Amabie after a half-fish, half-bird creature from Japanese mythology that has prophetic powers and brings luck to people who carry its image with them. Amabie walks nonchalantly along to the tune of Down by the River sung by Ray Charles, while the background behind it, captured by webcams in various locations throughout the globe, changes periodically. It is tempting to think of Amabie as an alter ego for the artist herself, since Frants is a widely travelled international curator and a co-founder of Cyland, which organises the annual international media art festival Cyfest in various locations around the globe.

Petermfriess. Darwin 2 / The Genesis of Tomorrow, 2023. Evolutionary vision AI short movie. © the artist.

Petermfriess, a dedicated believer in AI as the path towards the future of human development, has contributed a video, Darwin 2 / The Genesis of Tomorrow, to this exhibition, which looks and feels like as a rallying call for collaboration of the human and the technological or even alien entities. Inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Friess’s video extols the virtues of this collaboration and paints a picture of a “transhumanist” world free of contradictions. The narrator tells us that “art is a forum for transcending limitations and reconciling the species” and that following the path envisioned by the video, “we are bound not only for survival, but for beauty”.

Aernoudt Jacobs. Luminous Ether, 2025. 10-channel mimesis of EM waves, 30 x 45 cm (12 x 18 in) each. © the artist.

The two youngest artists in the show, Belgian Aernoudt Jacobs (b1968) and the Korean Eunsu Kang (b1974) work with sound installations and incorporate music into their art. While Jacobs’ practice has focused on creating objects that capture, produce and make sounds that surround us in everyday life, Kang has focused on understanding the collaborative and community-building potential of AI. For his Luminous Ether, Jacobs recorded electromagnetic waves, using AI to translate them into everyday sounds, which he also recorded. The speakers through which these sounds are transmitted are flat – they look like pictures painted in two colours of different hues. Even though at first glance they resemble miniature Rothkos, these small rectangular panels are impressive feats of engineering and programming. Made of foil with crystals inside, they contain an algorithm that translates electricity into movement. By adding layers to this foil with the help of screen printing, the artist was able to activate the surface and make sound audible and the light visible. The artist created an algorithm that transforms waves into sounds and light. His role here is similar to that of an engineer: the artwork is a feat of construction that makes us aware of invisible but real physical forces around us. They are as ubiquitous as the sounds of everyday life that become so commonplace that they usually escape our attention. 

Eunsu Kang in collaboration with Donald D. Craig. Hexad for a Guitarist and Artificial Organisms, 2025. Interactive installation made with Generative AI. © the artists.

Kang, the youngest artist in the group, is the one most focused on “collaborating” with AI. She calls AI our “new neighbour,” who is already part of our lives in many invisible ways. We must acknowledge this neighbour’s existence and treat it with respect. In this regard, her work, Hexad for a Guitarist and Artificial Organisms, which she made in collaboration with Donald Craig, a professional musician, showcases possible ways of interacting with AI that can be fun or even spiritually fulfilling. The work invites viewers to take part in a “jam session” with five computers – or, as the artist calls them, “AI-generated organisms” – by playing music and having AI play along by responding to the sounds produced. A minimum level of familiarity with music is required to fully enjoy the experience offered by the work. For the opening night, Craig played the guitar, and the AI response (or responses) were harmonious enough not to jar. For the average gallery-goer who engages with music in limited way, this kind of collaboration can be an interesting exploration of AI responses to various sounds they can make on a guitar. During the artists’ discussion that followed the exhibition, Kang commented on the difficulty of teaching AI the basic components of the music, because she could not find a good algorithm that could master and transmit the sense of time.

The artists discussion offered insights into their thinking and creative process. Part of Laser Talk series, associated with Leonardo, a leading journal covering the topic of science and technology in the arts, it was skilfully led by Carla Gannis, an American media artist. In the course of the conversation, a wide range of topics was covered pertaining to the place of AI in the creative process. There were as many views on the topic as there were artists, ranging from believing, like Manovich, that AI far surpasses our human capability to make things, including art, and can be “better” at it than “99.9%” of professional artists, and someone like Theys, who thinks of AI as a tool that an artist can use depending on what they make. According to him, AI cannot think independently and therefore, cannot create. Kang thought that, while AI is very good in certain areas, such as mathematics and production of things, it is limited in understanding concepts and situations that are not explicit and are complex such as culture or human personality. Manovich has also pointed out that he views AI as a “meta-media”, because it can simulate and combine all existing media. As such, it is similar to digital media and, in fact, can offer a virtually unlimited array of possibilities for humans in terms of formal capacities for creating anything. As Gannis pointed out, the task of the artist then becomes “narrowing the parameters” of this field of virtually limitless possibilities.