Artificial intelligence-driven poetry blazes at UrbanScreen, February 12 to May 1
Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection is an immersive outdoor art installation on view after sunset
pr0phecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, and Steve DiPaola, Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection, 2022, still from work in progress.
Surrey Art Gallery presents Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection outdoors at UrbanScreen (13458 107A Avenue) from February 12 to May 1. Preview night is February 10 at 6 pm.
CUTTING-EDGE TECHNOLOGY meets one of the oldest forms of writing in Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection.
The outdoor art project is a collaboration by pr0phecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, and Steve DiPaola—all artists and academic researchers at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Art and Technology—that explores artificial intelligence (AI)-driven poetry.
Through a randomized, generative digital process, the work draws from bacterial cultures, documentation of the Fraser River, and fragments of poetry to produce a series of composite audiovisual landscapes. Using machine learning algorithms, Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection expands the human form into digital space and mingles it with fragments of poetry, painting, and sound.
“In the present moment, our relationship both with our bodies and with the environments in which we live can often seem fragmentary or alienating,” assistant curator Rhys Edwards said in a release. “Body as Border is an attempt to respond to the challenges and subtleties of this relationship through art and poetry.”
DiPaola, a scientist and artist, uses computational models of creativity, cognition, and artificial intelligence to create generative and interactive art installations. His work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MIT Museum, Cambridge University’s King’s Art Centre, and the Smithsonian, among other places. In 2021, he was elected to the College of New Scholars by the Royal Society of Canada. Aceves-Sepúlveda is a media artist and cultural historian whose research focuses on feminist media art, aesthetics of interaction, and research-creation. The author of Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in post-1968 Mexico, she directs the Critical Media Art Studio at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology and is a member of art/mamas, a Vancouver-based collective of artist mothers. pr0phecy sun is an interdisciplinary performance artist and researcher who is a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Zinovieff, who has a master’s of fine arts from University of New South Wales, has a first-class honours degree from Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin. Her research looks at how sound can mediate relationships to landscapes in the Anthropocene age.
On display half an hour after sunset until midnight daily, the project marks the conclusion of exhibitions at UrbanScreen in its current location on the west wall of Chuck Bailey Recreation Centre. The site has been an outdoor exhibition space for Surrey Art Gallery since it opened as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2010.
Visit Surrey Art Gallery for more information.
Related Articles
