‘MEMES, PAINTINGS, AND AI.’

Doors opened (networking bar): 18h30 - Conference : 20h
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BNAIC is the Belgian-Dutch Association Conference being held in Brussels 6-7-8 November 2019. As a collateral event of the conference, the EU H2020 Odycceus project has organised an evening reflecting on the possible interactions between AI and art at BOZAR.

Artificial Intelligence and Social Media are having a very important impact on the way images are made and interpreted and how they are distributed in our society. This event examines this phenomenon from two angles. The first angle is the current production and rapid spreading of 'memes' (combinations of words and images) on 'dark' Internet sites such as 4chan. We see rapid pictorial and linguistic evolution by remixing, driven by competition for attention partly steered by AI algorithms. The second angle is the contemporary production of new paintings, notably those by Luc Tuymans, addressing how images function and deceive, how memory supports or distorts narrative interpretations of paintings, how words and images interact. What happens when ‘an AI’ looks at art? Can it deal not only with the formal, pictorial characteristics of a painting but also with its meaning? What can we learn about creativity from a deep study of art as meaning making?

In the framework of the FLOW - Scientist in Residency of Luc Steels in Studio Luc Tuymans as part of the Regional STARTS Centers, an initiative of the European Commission, in the framework of the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union.

©Luc Tuymans, Twenty Seventeen, 2017, Oil on canvas, 94,7 x 62,7 cm, Courtesy Francois Pinault, Overlayed to identify in red the most salient region perceived by the Kroner-Senden-Driessens-Goebel neural network - experiment carried out by Björn Wahle.