Missed the opening of Uno, Nessuno, Centomila? These were the themes

This Tuesday saw the opening of Electric Artefacts’ latest exhibition Uno, Nessuno, Centomila in collaboration with Umanesimo Artificale. The artists’ tour brought together Electric Artefacts co-founder Aleks Artamonovskaja, founder of Umanesimo Artificiale Filippo Rosati, and eight artists participating in the show: Mike Tyka, Lorem, Moisés Horta Valenzuela, Chris Kore, Chrystal Ding, Isabella Salas x Nora Golic, Giovanni Muzio and Pat Pataranutaporn. Each artist briefly introduced their practice and artwork in the exhibition, revolving around questions of, as Pataranutaporn put it; “the fluidity between technology and the human body."

Introducing the show, Rosati spoke about how he found inspiration in Nobel-prize in Literature winner Luigi Pirandello’s novel "One, No One and One Hundred Thousand", the original Italian title lending its name to the show. Rosati explained how Pirandello was “in constant search for an individual’s identity, psychology, and the nature of the human being”, themes that are relevant to a time in which we are trying to catch a myriad of co-existing identities in our digital presences. As Rosati puts it: “physical and digital identities are less and less separated. The overload of information is alienating, and we are pushed continuously to redefine who we are as individuals and as societies, with implications for our well-being.”

Central to Uno, Nessuno, Centomila, is the question of how these issues are turned on their head the moment that artificial intelligence enters the conversation and, as Chrystal Ding puts it; we have the “the possibility of a perspective outside our own.” In the realm of what makes us human, AI confronts us with that which we deem unhuman, and forces us to ask why.

The answer may have consequences reaching into every aspect of our world, but is of particular relevance to art when considering whether creativity can only be conceived by the human mind. As Mike Tyka points out, computational creativity is a question that comes up often in relation to AI-art, and seems to be “something that makes us feel insecure being human, this idea that another entity could perhaps be creative.”

During the event, many questions were raised exploring the fast-paced evolution of AI-technology, possibilities of modelling the patterns of mental illness, and the ways we define neurodivergence. Leaving room for further exploration of the impact these technologies will have in many different fields as well as machine “unlearning”, a concept addressed by Rosati touching upon the issues of data quality.

And so, Electric Artefacts continues to explore its current theme of Technoromanticism in the context of what defines human rationality and what sets our perceptions apart from those of the Frankenstein-like entities we may create. In pursuit of defying what binds and bounds us by nature, in Uno, Nessuno, Centomila we see “the juxtaposition of the ephemerality of human existence in contrast to the hyper-efficiency of the algorithms, as a critique to the transhumanist promise of immortality.”

Stay tuned for more conversations on the human condition in the face of technological advancement, and check out the show here.