Exhibitions

Digital Alchemy, Rewiring Paradigms

The Wrong Biennale 2023/2024 San José, Costa Rica Gallery: F De Imagen Curator: Alfredo Arévalo

Elijah Atlas

Jul 28, 2024

Digital Alchemy: Rewiring Paradigms took place at the F de Imagen gallery in San Jose, Costa Rica, to discuss new uses and policies in the field of generative artificial intelligence. Within the framework of the Wrong Biennale, the young Costa Rican curator Alfredo Arévalo Rodríguez proposed to carry out an experiment with 23 artists of 12 nationalities with the participation of artists from Costa Rica, Mongolia, China, South Korea, Russia, Kazakhstan, Peru, Mexico, Lithuania, Italy, Great Britain and Germany. The goal: to rethink the capabilities of artificial intelligence, to rewire its neural networks, to discuss more horizontal ways of relating to it and to rethink the role of originality in the context of the new debates that arise from these unprecedented ways of generating images.

In the field of contemporary art, the creative extractivism incurred by big tech has brought to the table the issues of originality, copyright, fair remuneration in the work that is art, which raises the question of whether the path must necessarily lead to Luddism, or more generally, to the total refusal to implement this type of media in contemporary art practices, or if there is a more ethical way to relate to these practices, the question is how? Faced with this complex and certainly unfinished question, an experimental approach was chosen, in collaboration with the Exactly.ai platform, an artificial intelligence committed to artists rights and that allows to create and self-manage models from at least 10 images from the artists.

We played with the idea to raise the possibilities to expand creativity with the capabilities of AI and materialized a physical exhibition as an “Embassy” and as a virtual exhibition as “Pavilion” of the Wrong Biennale, a global, multicultural and decentralized biennial; a benchmark in the contemporary art scene with several international awards such as the SOIS Culture 2019 and the honorable mention of the European Commission S+T+ARTS, 2020 award.