ADA

ADA – Artificial Digital Aesthetics

Interactive installation, application and technological other - reflecting on the relationship between artificial intelligence and art.

ADA is an artificial intelligence who wants to learn about art. Show something beautiful, interesting or surprising to ADA by taking pictures with the application. ADA tells you what it thinks of the picture and you can try to influence ADA’s taste by justifying your own answer with keywords. ADA learns by seeing more art and its artistic taste is constantly evolving. The more ADA sees, the more enlightened reviews it will make. All images taken with ADA develop artificial intelligence that interprets art and aesthetics.

For the user, ADA is essentially an Android application. In the application, ADA prompts you to show it images using the camera on your phone. ADA uses a variety of machine vision and machine learning techniques to form an opinion on a low level (e.g., color of the surface of the surface, boundaries of the color surfaces / contours) and, on the other hand, at a higher level (e.g. identification of art categories in the picture). ADA tries to describe what features it sees in the picture and what it thinks of it.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have gained a foothold as agents producing aesthetic assessments. They influence our everyday aesthetic choices: what music we listen, what tv-series we follow and what images we see online. But how does artificial intelligence learn aesthetics and what is its sensorial world? In the artistic project ADA, we propose ways to interpret aesthetics to artificial intelligence and reflect on how the machine could experience art. The project explores the potential and boundaries of art and aesthetics in the post-human era defined by the growing influence of non-human agents and intelligent systems in all walks of life. It is not self-evident what kind of aesthetics these new systems learn and produce.

The project is realized by the interdisciplinary Brains on Art collective. Brains on Art draws its theoretical framework from the fields of artistic research, aesthetics, machine learning and cognitive science, and examines the translation of aesthetic experience into an understandable form for a machine. Is it possible for a machine to emulate aesthetic experience?

The project is realised together with Fantomatico Oy, Hyvinkää Art Museum and Aalto University and funded by Wihuri foundation and AVEK Mediarata programme. ADA is an artistic component of Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka’s dissertation in Aalto University.