7.1 by Obvious
At our last private event, the Obvious artists' collective presented its collection of physical and digital artworks: the 7 Wonders of the World. For. 7 works on the 7 Wonders of the World and their digital extensions in NFT format.
Obvious' new series of works on display is the result of a lengthy artistic research project that saw them collaborate with historians to research and identify mentions of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in historical texts written by geographers, historians and writers. It is also the fruit of their multiple conversations with their algorithms and artificial intelligences, a work of iteration, selection and production with the aim of reinterpreting a classic art-historical subject. The works resulting from this creative process are thus at the crossroads of science, history and art. The mediums are oil paint and digital support, in the NFT format.
This collection of 7 works using oil paint, the result of Obvious' Artificial Intelligence and Algorithm work, combines different mediums, responding to each other in an artistic dialogue.
Where their predecessors used brush, charcoal, hammer or chisel, Obvious shapes their works using artificial intelligence and algorithms, NFTs, which they adapt to the object of their research. In this way, their work develops in dialogue with algorithms, before ultimately leading to plastic creations. A change of era, tools and language.
With the development of new creative tools based on recent technologies such as NFT and augmented reality, a new field of experimentation is opening up for artists wishing to interact with them. By the very nature of machine learning, artificial intelligence is imperfect, and results are not rigorously accurate in all cases. It is therefore interesting for artists to play with these margins of uncertainty, and to propose hijacked applications of algorithms that go beyond simple queries among existing data.
Obvious explores this new language, in a repeated dialogue with the machine, writing multiple scripts to generate images and steer the creation in the desired direction. Each work is the result of a process of back-and-forth and interaction with algorithms whose generative capacities are the result of complex numerical calculations. There is no autonomous creativity here, contrary to what the term "artificial intelligence" might imply. The author is not artificial intelligence, but the artists who use it as a tool in their creative process.
