Predictive Art Bot V4 (2017)
A GENERATOR OF NON-HUMAN ARTISTIC CONCEPTS
Predictive Art Bot is an algorithm that uses current discourse as a basis to create concepts for artistic projects and, at times, prophesize absurd future trajectories for art. Algorithms are now widely used in different fields to make predictions using data analysis, statistical analysis, and pattern recognition for applications including the purchasing behavior of particular groups, global market developments and even potential crimes. In contrast, the Predictive Art Bot is a specialist in making art forecasts, published daily on Twitter, which are meant to expand the limited human imagination with new, non-human perspectives. As a parody of transhumanist prophecies, the Predictive Art Bot liberates artists from the constraints of creativity and develops ideas not yet implemented or conceived by humans. - Inke Arns
See the bot in action: PredictiveArtBot.com
Twitter feed: @predartbot
Conception: Disnovation.org (Nicolas Maigret & Maria Roszkowska)
Programming: Jérôme Saint-Clair
Pictures: Dasha Ilina
"Predictive Art Bot plays with a convergent future in which there will be no difference between people and machines – the dark vision of Ray Kurzweil and his colleagues at the Singularity University. This vision has a long heritage – in the earlier part of the 20th century, Lacan and the surrealists played with automatic writing and possible non-human futures; in the 1950s the cyberneticians and futurists experimented with creative or expressive automata. Raymond Queneau to my knowledge created the first algorithmic poetry – his 100,000,000,000,000 sonnets.
Today, the algorithm seems to be winning the day: our lives, purchases and political and cultural views seem increasingly governed by what Facebook, Google and Amazon algorithms have decided not about who we are, but who our domesticated future selves will be. Where is the role here for the new perspective, the artistic insight. In the deeply ironic Predictive Art Bot, Disnovation produces a work which is at once an inspirational conceptual feed for future artistic tropes and a commentary on the vacuity of trusting our very selves to algorithmic culture." — Geoffrey Bowker
Snapshots, Work in progress, 2017-2018