Artists and robots: artificial imagination rules?
Our world has been universally and uniformly transformed by advances in artificial intelligence and its scientific, industrial, financial and domestic applications. We might be forgiven, then, for thinking that art, to paraphrase André Malraux, would be the last (direct) path from man to man. The Artists & Robots project explores this other, less publicised but no less actual dimension of the rule of advanced technology: the advent of the artificial imagination. Is a machine capable of being an artist’s equal? Can a robot ever replace a painter or sculptor? To what extent is there such a thing as artificial creativity? Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci drew dream machines – a floating palace, a helicopter, a tank, an industrial loom. But this kind of visionary genius does not seem to have dared imagine a machine to replace the artist. Machines to create: these are the works presented in the first museographic exhibition organised by the Rmn-Grand Palais to look in detail at artificial imagination in its various artistic materialisations, and to address the major issues raised by this technical revolution: artists who create machines that create art.
Curators: Miguel Chevalier, artist, and Jérôme Neutres, director of strategy and development at the RMN-Grand Palais
