‘AI Is Us’:
Artists Explore How The Technology We Make Also Makes Us

by Leslie Katz

In the center of a large rectangular gallery hulks an unruly 10-foot-tall heap of obsolete, and obsolescing, consumer electronics: monitors, hard drives, printers, overhead projectors, landlines and cables — lots and lots of knotted, tangled cables.

As an old radio in the pile emits a steady hiss of static, some screens flicker and others stay still. The mass of electronics looks like it could collapse with the poke of a rogue finger.

This is “The E-Waste Land,” one of six large-scale installations that make up “Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies,” an immersive new AI-infused exhibit from artists Nathaniel Stern and Sasha Stiles that explores how humans and technology evolve side by side, inextricable and directly reflective of one another.

Stern is a professor of creative technologies and mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Stiles, a Harvard- and Oxford-educated poet, co-founded theVERSEverse, a poetry NFT gallery.

The pair’s exhibit opens Saturday at the Krasl Art Center in St. Joseph, Michigan, where it will remain on display through July 27 before likely continuing on to other locales. Visitors to the Krasl will encounter a fusion of sculptures, prints, gadgets, music, movement and AI-generated poems displayed in an AI-generated font Stern and Stiles created, trained on images of letters.

One of the six installations features tactile sculptural letters that spell out “Mother Computer,” each formed in the shape of that downloadable font. The sculpture, forged in metal salvaged from recycled media, is meant to serve as a material metaphor for technology’s environmental impact.

In another corner of the Krasl Art Center, visitors can pick up crayons, coloring books, stencils and tracing paper to practice drawing the AI-generated font, which the artists named Neural Network Font Type and also playfully call “Feral Font.” The font, which they refer to as a “transhuman alphabet,” resembles bold, childlike handwriting — fitting, Stern says, as AI is “just a baby.”

Humans and the tools they imagine and construct have evolved together since our earliest ancestors carved weapons from stone. But Stern and Stiles see that relationship as particularly timely now, given the rise of generative AI. While the technology has generated a surge of excitement and experimentation, much of the public discourse around it centers on concerns that it’s stealing creative work, supplanting blood-and-bone workers and even diminishing appreciation for human artistry.

“Generation to Generation” intentionally eschews tinges of blind optimism or paralyzing fear in its approach to artificial intelligence.

“We want to nuance and complicate and deepen the dialogue,” Stern said in an interview. “We’re looking at the history of technology materially, in many ways to get people to understand and engage with AI as something that is not so foreign, as something that is all of these previous technologies, feeds all of these previous technologies, feeds into them.”

Stern has previously burned and smashed consumer electronics to imagine what they might look like a million years from now and created a series of poems co-written with AI to explore the voices and stories of Greek mythological characters including Odysseus, Achilles, Icarus, Medusa, Artemis and Ariadne — with a sci-fi twist.

Stiles often blends words, images and algorithms for media-rich poetry that explores human voices in a digital age. Poems created with her “AI alter ego” form the foundation for a number of the exhibit’s installations. This human-machine collaboration involves an extensive back and forth, along with careful editing and refinement, a process that can take weeks.

“It often feels to me that a third mind or third voice emerges from the process, an entity that is not mine nor the AI’s but a synthesis of us both,” Stiles said in an interview.

T.S. Eliot Meets Artificial Intelligence

That’s the case for a companion poem she wrote for “The E-Waste Land” that mirrors “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot’s landmark work about loss and decay. Eliot has long been Stiles’ favorite poet, and her version mirrors the original in its number of lines, syllables and stanzas. Excerpts of it appear painted or embossed on the installation’s fractured components in the AI-generated font.

The words “I am no machine!” stretch across a broken monitor, for example, and “Now be silent, all of you” spans a circuit board that once hummed with data — “a poetic monument to data loss and a reminder of all the humanity embedded in these seemingly cold, sterile machines,” Stiles said.

The sense that technology can never fully be separated from those who create it even emerges in the color palette of “The E-Waste Land,” whose disparate parts are painted a pinkish off-white that could, to some eyes, evoke human flesh. The message of entwinement threads through the exhibit, especially in its explorations of AI.

“AI is us, and it’s more than us,” Stern said. “It encompasses us. It is not just a tool, because we create our tools. Because of that, we have to take accountability both for how we use it and how we create it.”