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. Like many of the successful contemporary artists (e.g. Ai Wei Wei, Olafur Eliason), Ai-Da has studio technicians. Her blended persona and her art practise help us reflect on our own individual and collective relationship with technology, and as such, provide an astute mirror of contemporary currents and behaviour.

Ai-Da is a partial 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