The first 10 minutes of Wisdom of AI Light is totally bewitching. You are suddenly in the womb of a space that is shifting and swirling all around you. An exquisite soundtrack helps you centre as you drift aimlessly around trying to find where to be. You can wander, stand, sit, or turn but most people found their space quickly and remained still – mesmerised. Pictures and patterns and shapes fold and bend and soar in an ever-changing visual landscape that evokes childlike wonder. The Da Vinci segment teased with glimpses of the known – the Mona Lisa, Christ, and Vitruvian Man – before dissolving back into an abstract world of a different kind of beauty. The kind of beauty that results from artificial intelligence going to work on 20,000 of Da Vinci’s artworks. (One can’t watch this without wondering what Da Vinci may have thought of this if he were alive today!)
Occasionally in this short 30 minute show we are reminded of the raw data that is the basis of these projections and surrounded by thousands of thumbnail sketches scrolling rapidly past in multiple directions.
The Poetic AI segment churns out electronic wizardry from the text and images of great thinkers of the past. Letters, numbers, shapes form new creations that might be called a new kind of literacy – a literacy based on sensation rather than thought, on feeling rather than meaning.
The Data Monolith segment explodes the past literally as archaeological stonework bursts into fragments and spin out across the room to later reform as solid walls.
Everything is changing all of the time whichever way you look and in a strange way you start to go a bit numb and wonder about yourself in all of this. Where do I belong in this new form of expression? It’s all extraordinary; blindingly dazzling. Because we know the raw material for this production stems from history’s greatest minds and some of humanity’s greatest achievements it is hard not to dwell on what it all might mean. Or is it better to turn off your cognitive self and just immerse yourself in the wonder of it all?
Musically the show divides quite radically into two parts. The flowing, soothing score from Ludovici Einaudi is utterly compatible with Da Vinci’s time. The music for the other segments was much more abrasive, modern, mechanical – robotic even. Returning to something more ethereal for the segments connected to space and dark matter might have served to better separate them thematically and maintain the level of interest towards the end of the show.
Shakespeare’s words were probably incorporated in the Poetic segment somewhere. It was he who wrote ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Wisdom of AI Light felt a bit like that. Like a metaphor for contemporary times, it is fast moving, seductive, random, visually astounding, and shows off incredibly impressive use of emerging technologies – it all looks and sounds so impressive. It looks and sounds as if it should all be deeply meaningful. It is immensely entertaining, but I suspect life’s mysteries are more likely to be solved sitting under a tree on a sunny day, or by the sea at sunset.
(This article also published on The Clothesline.)
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