A two channel video installation comprising images and animated short loops where the artist collaborates with artificial intelligence to explore questions about the afterlife and how a machine imagines the metaphysical and the transcendental. All images are produced through generative technologies—the final artistic works—are fully created by machine intelligence without the artist’s interference.
LOCATION: New Waves in Art and Tech exhibition
Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park Governors Island
All events are free.
Artist Opening Saturday May 18, 2024 from 2 – 4:30 pm with a performance by Mónica de la Torre and Hans Tammen at 2:30 pm.
Open to the public from 11 am to 5 pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and by appointment.
In this series of works comprising several images and animated short loops, Ahmed El Shaer collaborates with artificial intelligence to explore questions about the afterlife and how a machine imagines the metaphysical and the transcendental. All images produced through generative technologies—the final artistic works—are fully created by machine intelligence without the artist’s interference. A radical experiment in what Islamic art could look like in the 21st century, away from stereotypical expectations and orientalist images. AI Heaven is alluring and terrifying. The images play with our perception, unsettling our expectations of form and meaning as we stare into these works, created by a nonhuman agent.
Artist Statement
As a final stage for the Artificial Intelligence Paradise project, I will complete the questions that I started with the project in March 2021. What if we asked our existential questions that trouble humanity with artificial intelligence as a neutral party? In the world after death, whatever heaven or hell, can artificial intelligence exploit this human weakness and create an imaginary paradise to control our capabilities? So at this point in the project, we’re going on a tour of motion pictures created by artificial intelligence.
Artist Bio:
Ahmed El Shaer is a contemporary artist born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1981 who currently lives and works in New York, USA. El Shaer is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans the mediums of installation, photography, sound, and moving images, with a particular interest in new technologies. holds a B.F.A. from the Faculty of Art and Education and is currently a Ph.D. student at the computing and games department at Abertay University, Scotland, UK. He exhibited in various international art venues, including the 56th Venice Biennal, Venice, Italy (2015). Bamako Biennale, Bamako-Mali (2011) Cairotronica New Media Festival, Cairo, Egypt. Sanctioned Array, White Box, New York, USA (2010). Solo show at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, USA (2019). Rencontres Internationales Festival Paris/Berlin: Represent Egypt at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022.
El Shaer was awarded several times, including the Fulbright fellowship in Los Angeles at UCLA Game Lab 2018, the Salon of Youth Honour Award in 2002, the first in media in 2003, and the first in media art in 2013 in Cairo, Egypt. He was granted several artists in residence programs: Prohelvetia, Zurich, 2009; Cite Internationale D’Arte Paris, invited by the French Institute, France, 2016; and ArtOMI RESIDENCY, New York, USA, 2012.
His work is in public collections, including New Cinema in Paris, France, and the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo, Egypt. His works have been featured in several publications, including Contemporary Practices Magazine, Hanan al-Cinema Affections for the Moving Image, and MIT Press. By Laura U. Marks.
PRESS QUOTES
On top of reflections of the present, the Digital section is also an opportunity to relook at where we came from to understand where we might be headed. An example of this exercise is Ahmed El Shaer’s AI Heaven, a series of work created with the use of artificial intelligence to imagine what the afterlife could look like. In training AI model to visualise the metaphysical and transcendental, the artist utilises the machine as a portal into accessing imagination that goes beyond what is human and innate to us. Through this process, the artist also takes an intentional departure from what was understood to be Orientalist art from the 18th and 19th century, to reimagine and reinterpret what Islamic art could look like in the 21st century as it becomes integrated with machine learning. The generated visuals is also demonstrative of how artists like El Shaer are seeking to use technological innovation to bridge current digital aesthetics, which is often sterile and devoid of cultural specific motifs, with their own heritage and attempt at preserving visual histories in digital art.
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/ahmed.e.shaer.3/
https://www.instagram.com/ahmed_elshaer_studio/
COLLABORATORS
Music: Ahmed El Habback
INTERVIEWS AND PRESS COVERAGE
About the New Waves in Art and Tech exhibition. Programmed for the Harvestworks Art and Technology Program on Governors Island this group show that opens the season with studies in human perception via artworks that explore privacy, brain-computer interfaces, climate and fungal networks, Artificial Intelligence and themes of air, flying and floating. Selected by the Harvestworks arts committee, the works use creative technology such as audio spatialization, stochastic audio, gesture and biotech interfaces and simple motorized devices.
