ARTXCODE's Curation with Cinello, Art Basel 2024

Lost Specimens by Linda Dounia

A poignant exploration of loss, memory and preservation, Dounia’s artworks are beautiful re-imaginations of extinct species from her hometown in the Sahel region in Africa. Collectively titled Lost Specimens, they draw from her existing studies and research for Once Upon A Garden, a project blending botanical study with AI-driven speculative fiction to address disparities in the ways data is collected and stored.

Once upon a flower A— 0X06 (still)

Once upon a flower A— 0X09 (still)

Unable to find photographic evidence of the specious that once throve during her grandmother’s time, Dounia set out to recreate them with AI. Using a combination of decaying herbarium sheets and her own photographs, the artist trained a GAN AI model. The generated visuals provided a sense of what the plants may have looked like in their prime, representing the artist's attempt to, not only expose the gaping holes within global data collection, but preserve what little information is left before that too is eradicated from our memory. The process of generating and examining thousands of images was Dounia's way of creatively grieving the loss of her natural heritage, digitally enhancing them as if to breathe life into the ecological narratives that remain unheard.

Installation View, Cinello Booth, Art Basel 2024

The wind on my lips and in my hair by Sasha Stiles

Stiles presents a simple yet sophisticated piece of AI-powered poetry. Defined by a single phrase, The wind on my lips and in my hair, it evocatively expresses our delicate, yet tangible, relationship with the natural world, while weaving together a range of references from the artist’s own past.

The wind on my lips and in my hair (still)

Before delving into her now acclaimed practice of algorithmic authorship, Stiles wrote analog poems where the wind frequently captured her imagination and emerged as motifs in her writing. The artist vividly recalls the inspiration for the first lines of her poem, Warden of the Winds, penned during her student years after reading Sylvia Plath's The Moon and the Yew Tree. Plath’s poem, whereby a protagonist seemingly searches for meaning and light amongst nature’s metaphors, evoked in Stiles’ mind the image and sensation of ‘wind as fingers in my hair’. This phrase struck her deeply as a way to distill complex emotions and influences into a single metaphor and became integral to the training dataset for early versions of her now acclaimed AI co-author, Technelegy. As such, this single line of generative poetry probes the past, present and future of Stiles' experiments with AI. Presented before a dynamic backdrop of sunlight and shadows, it captures the core of Technelegy's machine imagination and merges it seamlessly with the poetic force of nature's own algorithm.

Installation View, Cinello Booth, Art Basel 2024

Losing Nemo by Helena Sarin

Sarin’s Losing Nemo is a characteristic of her playful approach to creating art with AI. Fascinated by the pictorial potential of neural networks, she trains machine-learning models on her own analog artworks. In doing so, she initiates a dialogue between hand-crafted and AI-generated patterns, expanding her visual language though the imagination, or ‘hallucinations’, of the machine. A vibrant depiction of two fish, Losing Nemo, is based on the artist’s hand-drawn sketches and meticulously crafted ceramic tiles decorated using sgraffito and silkscreen techniques. These physical pieces were digitized and processed through a scripted chain of AI models.

Losing Nemo

Rather than employing a single GAN model comprising two neural networks, Sarin layers multiple on top of each other, creating a pipeline to capitalize on the endless and unpredictable interactions between them. The resulting image combines and transforms an array of Sarins’ analog works into a 2.5D render that retains the tactile qualities of the original clay tiles. With its rich colors and layered depths, Losing Nemo encompasses an indiscernible blend of organic and algorithmic elements, playfully subverting our understanding of the analog-divide divide.

Installation View, Cinello Booth, Art Basel 2024