By Gaia Giordani. Cover image by Kristine Urban for I’M Firenze Digest.
What are the best gateways to altered states of consciousness? What is the true nature of reality? Which is more important, knowledge or imagination? How to shorten time? Is there a way to decolonise our minds? Why tortoises live so long, and do they know about lunar eclipses? Do plants have feelings? This is the incipit of latest Ai Weiwei project in collaboration with ChatGPT.
“Many of the questions are unanswerable, but they’re valid”, says the artist and director Ai Weiwei, presenting his project “Ai vs. AI”, which challenges AI with existential and philosophical questions.
The exhibition is part of CIRCA 20:24, started on January 11th until March 31st, stopping advertisements on Piccadilly Lights in London for the CIRCA project, a global gallery that showcases messages for humankind from artists, freedom fighters, and intellectuals.
If an artist is not an activist, can he/she still can be considered an artist?
Through this question, Weiwei highlights the crucial role of artists as activists in conveying important messages. The CIRCA project started in 2020 with a strong social purpose, which began with a takeover of one digital billboard as a platform for spreading new ideas through art.
Before Ai Weiwei, so many disruptive thinkers were recruited: fashion icon Michèle Lamy, video artist Douglas Gordon, performance artist Laurie Anderson and the Dalai Lama with one big goal: to shed some light on those dark times.
“If humans will ever be liberated, it will be because we ask the right questions, not provide the right answers.” – Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei’s quest for enlightenment is the core of his art project with ChatGPT
The artist believes that we place too much importance on answers that in our society are “mass-produced in knowledge factories”, like schools and religious institutions, or rooted in myths and superstitions. Conversely, what poetry and art offer is vastly different from the byproduct of AI or social constructs.
The Ai Weiwei project with ChatGPT is inspired by the Chinese book of poetry Tiānwèn, also known as The Heavenly Questions book. The 81 questions in the book refer to the number of days he was imprisoned by the Chinese government in 2011.
On the exhibition’s website, you can check all the questions and find all the answers, plus there’s a form for you to fill in to leave your answer.
For all humans the one capacity and freedom we retain is the question. Questions are, in themselves, generative: in asking, we sketch out a terrain vague of human inquiry.
Ai Weiwei art project is about making mistakes to grasp the big unknown
In an editorial for The Guardian, Ai Weiwei stated that “technology is no match for the human will, with all its potential for beauty, creativity and the possibility of making mistakes”.
In the last couple of centuries, humans have made incredible technological progress. However, according to the great thinker Weiwei, many aspects of our social evolution remain primitive. For example, we still engage in war, we prioritise entertainment over social justice, and we are on the brink of mass extinction.
“This shift has contributed to a society increasingly moving away from spiritual pursuit”, writes the contemporary artist in his article. Ai Weiwei genuinely believes that Artificial Intelligence is not immune to this trend, and his latest project serves as evidence of this.
