Characters are a means of visual communication and recording a language. Civilizations throughout the world have created various characters that convey their culture and history. This project focuses purely on the form of the characters rather than their meaning.
The characters have been learned by artificial intelligence (AI) not for their meaning but for their shape and patterns. The AI has created and drawn lines that look like characters but do not have any meaning.
This work was publicized at the Aichi Triennale 2016 international art festival. It was implemented by collecting handwritten artist statements or descriptions of work by an extremely broad international group of ten participating artists. By learning handwriting with one writer in each language, the artificial intelligence collected information on the shapes of each character system, as well the idiosyncrasies of each writer. The lines generated are written as if they mean something important; they also look deceptive.
Credits
Machine Learning Programming: Hironori Sakamoto
Supported by Nihon Unisys, Ltd., Haps
Sponsored by Japan Media Arts Festival and Bunkacho – Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan
Handwriting provided by: Valsan Koorma Kolleri, Lai Chih-sheng, Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev, Kio Griffith, Ali Cherri, Taloi Havini, Song Sanghee, Shreyas Karle, Kawayan De Guia, Uudam Tran Nguyen
Harshit Agrawal (IN), Junichi Yamaoka (JP), Yasuaki Kakehi (JP)
In various everyday tasks we effectively authorize machines to momentarily substitute their own intelligence for our minds, without reflecting on how their authorship influences our thoughts and actions. Through author(rise), the artists investigate how this relationship evolves, when the substitution leaks out of the mental domain and into our physical body. They created a handwriting system where the hand acts as a surrogate for an AI to write out its thoughts, with the tip of the pen is being attracted by a magnet on a plotter below the paper.
A person starts writing, but soon the machine takes control of the pen’s movements. Trained on a large collection of philosophical texts and human writing, the AI moves the magnet to produce a continuation of the writing. How do we feel when our hand “mindlessly” moves on the paper but eventually writes something meaningful, when this aother uthor of our everyday lives rises from beneath the surface onto our fingertips. How do we extend this experience to rethinking the balance of authorship and authorization, as machine intelligence grows?