The Imitation Game: Massive AI exhibit launching at Vancouver Art Gallery

A new exhibit launches this weekend at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Curated by Bruce Grenville and Glenn Entis, The Imitation Game will run from March 5 until October 23. 

Bruce and Glenn worked closely with advisers drawn from communities active in the research and production of artificial intelligence (AI), and collaborated with the Centre for Digital Media, a research and production-oriented program jointly administered by UBC, the British Columbia Institute of Technology, Emily Carr, and SFU. With the participation of the UBC Public Humanities Hub, they were able to facilitate direct connections to AI research and collaboration opportunities at UBC.

The exciting and extensively researched show features an array of work by internationally acclaimed Chinese Canadian artist Sougwen Chung, visual artist Scott Eaton, and American–Israeli designer Neri Oxman, among many other international creators.

Amber Frid-Jimenez, Après Ballet Mécanique, 2018, 2-channel video (still), Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery

Years in the making, The Imitation Game examines both the uses and abuses of AI in the production of modern and contemporary visual culture around the world and chronicles a narrative from the 1950s to the present moment.

Bruce told Daily Hive he was inspired to put on the show by his co-curator, Glenn, and said “the extraordinary rise in the use of artificial intelligence, or deep learning as Glenn said, by many of the designers, programmers, researchers and artists that he knew through his consulting work suggested that there was something going on that might make a great exhibition.”

Sougwen Chung, Omnia per Omnia, 2018, video (still), Courtesy of the Artist

Perhaps most well-known for bringing AI to the forefront is British logician and computer pioneer Alan Turing, who described an abstract computing machine consisting of a limitless memory and a scanner that moves back and forth through the memory, symbol by symbol, reading what it finds and writing further symbols. Turing stated, “A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”

The Imitation Game exhibit highlights the growth of AI since then, across the spectrum, including animation, architecture, art, fashion, graphic design, urban design and video games, over the past decade. 

Vancouver Art Gallery

750 Hornby Street, Vancouver
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