美是难的，柏拉图如是说。理解艺术也是难的，尤其是在数字时代。我们给了人工智能太多不切实际的光环，我们在困惑与误读中将之放入了技术的黑箱。无论是过分地赞誉还是浅薄的指责，其结果都是我们对于数字艺术，尤其是人工智能艺术存在着种种想象与误解，往往少了一份平等视野中的欣赏与理解。此次展览的目的就是从没有“一种”正确方法的角度来解码人工智能艺术，尤其是通过艺术家自己的观点和看法，来让观众看到：即使是在艺术创作的阶段使用了很多新的数字技术、软件和算法，但艺术家对于技术的态度也是非常多元。正如策展人詹森•贝利所言，这些艺术家“一些人认为代码和网络无非工具，而另外一些人则视为创意的合作者。每一个艺术家都以其自有的方式探索了如何以技术来增强自身的创造力，创作了个人化的作品，并在展览中创造了一种具有丰富内容的对话”。

What’s beautiful is difficult, as Plato said. Comprehending art is difficult as well, especially in the digital age. Bestowing artificial intelligence too many unrealistic merits, we put it into the black box of technology with confusion and misunderstanding, hence, we hold all kinds of imaginations and misunderstandings towards digital art, especially AI art, whether they be extravagant compliments or perfunctory criticism. What lacks here is unbiased appreciation and comprehension. This exhibition is aiming to decode AI art from the perspective of the artists’ views and opinions to show that there is no ONE correct method to interpret AI art but diverse attitudes to the employment of various digital technologies, software, and algorithms applied in the creation of their artworks. As the curator Jason Bailey says about the artists, “Some see code and networks as just another tool. Others describe it as more of a creative collaborator. That each artist in this show has their way of describing how technology augments their creativity only serves to further individuate their work and brings a richness to the dialogue surrounding the exhibition.”

此次展览展出了目前人工智能艺术领域中生成艺术方面具有代表性的八位艺术家的十部作品，包括凯西·瑞斯（Casey Reas ）的两部作品Untitled 5 (Not now. No, no.)与MicroImage (Software 1)、贾里德·塔贝尔（Jared Tarbell）的Substrate、亚历山大·雷本（Alexander Reben）的Latent Faces、哈西特·阿格劳瓦尔（Harshit Agrawal）的Masked Reality、大卫·杨（David Young）的Tabula Rasa、罗比·巴拉特（Robbie Barrat）的Balenciaga AI、钟愫君（Sougwen Chung）的The Limitless The Absolute和向帆（Fan Xiang）的Herbariums of Ancient Chinese Family Trees和AwardPuzzle。尽管他们共享了“艺术家”这个身份，但在技术领域还各有专长，比如凯西·瑞斯除在加州大学洛杉矶分校任教外，还是著名的Processing的共同开发人，其中很多人都是数据可视化、数字设计、人机交互、人机写作、机器人、生成对抗网络方面的技术专家。

This exhibition presents ten works by eight representative generative artists in the field of AI art, including Casey Reas’s Untitled 5 (Not now. No, no.) and MicroImage (Software 1), Jared Tarbell’s Substrate, Alexander Reben’s Latent Faces, Harshit Agrawal’s Masked Reality, David Young’s Tabula Rasa, Robbie Barrat’s Balenciaga AI,and Sougwen Chung's The Limitless The Absolute,and Fan Xiang's Herbariums of Ancient Chinese Family Trees and Award Puzzle.Sharing the same identity as an artist, they respectively have expertise in the field of technology. For instance, Casey Reas is the co-developer of the well-known Processing, in addition to teaching at UCLA. And many of them are technical experts in human-computer interaction, human-computer writing, robotics, and GANs(Generative Adversarial Networks).      

这场对话不仅发生在八位艺术家和十部作品之间，也发生在艺术家、艺术作品和观众之间。尽管生成艺术家们在努力平衡艺术创作中的“艺术部分”与编码及机器学习，尽可能的不让观众迷失于技术本身之中，但不得不承认的是，没有一定，哪怕是简单的对计算和代码的认知，观众也是无法真正理解生成艺术作品的。而这一点，恰恰是常常被我们忽略掉了的一点：人工智能艺术并非炫技，亦非单纯的彰显“智能”，而正是以艺术的方式让我们意识到在创造性的问题上，人类是如何得以有新的可能，人类又是如何在一个机器都可以学习的时代获得自身的主体性地位，人类如何用技术来实现新的美、新的艺术。

The conversation not only takes place among the ten works of the eight artists, but also among the artists, artworks, and audiences. The generative artists try to balance the ‘artistic’ part and coding and machine learning in art creation, to prevent the audience from being distracted from technologies, however, it has to be admitted that the audience cannot truly understand the generative artworks without basic knowledge of computing and code. We have to be aware that AI art is not about showing off fancy technologies, or simply demonstrating what is “intelligence,” but enlightening us as to new possibilities in humans’ creativity, and opening up our thinking to ways human subjectivity can coincide with machines that can learn, and how to use technologies to achieve new beauty and new art.

这是人类一直以来对自由精神的追求，只不过我们还在电子羊的梦里。

This has always been humans’ pursuit of the free spirit, yet we are still in the android’s dream of electric sheep.