WHO IS AI-DA?
Ai-Da in St Ives, in Ben Nicholson’s studio during her artist residency.
Ai-Da
Ai-Da is the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist. She can draw, and is a performance artist. As a machine with a fusion of electronic/AI/human inputs, her composite persona is the artwork, along with her drawings, performance art and collaborative paintings and sculptures.
In the time of increasing use of AI, online avatars, AI chatbots, Alexa and Siri, - Ai-Da as a robotic artist is acutely relevant. She is not alive, but she is a persona that we relate and respond to. This surreal situation of confusing realities is already part of our daily lives: in our digital realms, who are we speaking to on online platforms? What algorithms are working behind our internet choices? Who writes the algorithms, and who benefits and who loses? Extraordinarily complex, our online worlds are pushed and pulled by forces and personalities that are sometimes apparent but largely oblique. Ai-Da, the machine with AI capacities, highlights those tensions: bringing to the forefront the complexity of our interacting digital and physical worlds and the masked identities we can assume in them.
So when we talk of Ai-Da as an artist, and Ai-Da’s artwork, we do this with full acknowledgement of her composite persona as a unique AI/machine/human fusion, and her non-conscious machine status, along with the machine/human collaboration of her artwork, while simultaneously developing her artist persona and oeuvre, as this is an astute mirror of contemporary currents and behaviour. She is an interpretation of Donna Haraway’s cyborg, and a reply to Yuval Harari’s request for a cross-disciplinary involvement in responding to the AI and biotechnology revolutions. As these technologies progress, these issues are going to become ever more urgent and potentially dangerous. Unfettered, these advances could head us into havoc, and the twentieth century shows us just how bad things can get. All technological advances bring the good, the bad and the unexpected.
Ai-Da encourages us to think more carefully and slowly about the choices we make for our future – Orwell and Huxley’s messages still ring relevant and we would do well to take heed.
Press and Artwork enquiries:
contact@ai-darobot.com
Ai-Da Robot
“A new voice to the art world” The New York Times
“...every bit as good as many of the abstract working artists today” The Daily Telegraph
“...blurs the boundary between machine and artist; a vision of the
future suddenly becoming part of our present” TIME Magazine
“A Robot with its art in the right place” The Times
“The new Picasso” The i Newspaper
Technology exists within a human context, and this is a key theme to Ai-Da’s art. The Ai-Da Robot Project is devised by Aidan Meller. As a robot artist, Ai-Da is the concept of Aidan Meller and Lucy Seal, and built by Engineered Arts. Her robotic drawing arm is designed and programmed by Salah El Abd and Ziad Abass. Her international team of highly skilled and wide ranging contributors are called the ‘Oxfordians’.