This is a solo exhibition featuring the works of Chen Baoyang, a young teacher of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), with Professor Feng Mengbo, Director of the School of Experimental Art and Technology Art, as the academic advisor, and Sun Qianqian, a young teacher of CAFA, as the curator.
Vice Director Qiu Zhijie said that Chen Baoyang is one of the first artists to think and explore in the field of intelligent agents, and the next step should be to actively create concepts to push history forward. For example, in the past, a lot of brain-related art was brain image art and brain imaging art, but today the most mainstream concept is to use brain waves to drive behavior or performance. If the logic of story-writing appears, there will soon be brain augmentation consciousness, brain training consciousness, and brain modification consciousness. I hope that this project will lead to more exhibitions that are bold in putting forward concepts, propositions, and that even be remembered in the history of art in the future.
The secretary of the CAFA Art Museum, Han Wenchao said that although the venue for the “Expand & Curate –Young Experiment Project Space” project is small, the theme and presentation of the exhibition are very diverse. The opening of this exhibition is significant for the art museum on many levels. First, this is the first exhibition about artificial intelligence (AI), and provides a valuable case for the academic accumulation and construction of the “Expand & Curate –Young Experiment Project Space” project. Second, as a national key art museum and a national popular science education base, the deep integration of science and technology and art offers a very vivid example for the art museum to explore in the construction of a national popular science base. Finally, Chen Baoyang actively pays attention to and leads this field from the perspective of embracing the times and conforming to the trend, and together with the forum of “AI+Art: Intelligent Agent Art and Machine Consciousness”, he tries to improve the depth and breadth of the audience’s thinking.
Professor Feng Mengbo congratulated the two young teachers on behalf of the School of Experimental Art and Technology Art. Chen Baoyang is a young scholar and teacher who has been studying artificial intelligence in the direction of science and technology arts very early. “Expand & Curate –Young Experiment Project Space” is a platform specially provided for young teachers of CAFA to demonstrate their talents, which is of great significance to participate in it.
Curator Sun Qianqian explained the origin of the exhibition title. The symbol (q|p) is a branch of contemporary philosophical logic called “reasoning logic thinking”. The meaning of this expression is, in the situation of p, what kind of behavior should an intelligent agent carry out? Then this behavior is replaced by q. This explanation is also a key point that runs through a series of works by Chen Baoyang. It is hoped that Mr. Chen’s works can be used to think about, from an artistic point of view, how to present a rational subject that may exist in the world installation composed of human minds, or even how to reach a mutual understanding in the interaction between humans and machine subject that assumes certain moral emotions and moral values.
Artist Chen Baoyang talked about how, as a creator, he has been thinking about what artificial intelligence can do in the context of art. When AI drive some intelligent agents, it can be seen that intelligent agents have various relationships with each other, such as social simulation, or constructed virtual digital characters, etc., which will be presented in this exhibition.
For this exhibition, we have selected Chen Baoyang’s “Alt-Mirage” series of works about artificial intelligence and social simulation, which were created in 2023. As AI research and creation shift from generative tasks to agents and agencies based on environmental perception, this exhibition also represents a practical shift in the Turing problem, from solving the problem of AI Creativity to gaining insights into whether the machine has a preliminary “consciousness” or not. To achieve this goal, the exhibition created a virtual Arena called “Alt-Mirage”, which is an environment that combines narrative structure, multiple intelligent agents, and cognitive science. Through confrontation and collaboration between intelligent agents, the exhibition aims to deconstruct the social changes brought about by new technologies, focusing on the influence of technology on humans and society.
