The dialogue around generative AI often focuses on its negative impacts, including a shrinking job market for artists, but the fine art world in Japan addressed this technology in a more nuanced manner during Art Week Tokyo (AWT) earlier this month.
At the fourth iteration of the event, held at galleries and museums across the city, many of the participating artists were incorporating AI and framing it as an active collaborator in their practices.
For the central AWT exhibition ¡°,¡± composer and visual artist Tomomi Adachi contributed instruments originally conceived by an AI image generator trained on historical art. Without the context of how instruments relate to human appendages and breathing, the results range from difficult to impossible to play. Adachi, no stranger to outlandish , performed live at the exhibition opening, producing ethereal and at times discordant music from a contraption that blended strings, percussion and a head-mounted horn. He called the instruments ¡°a way of engaging with nonhuman intelligence beyond our comprehension.¡±
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