AI: Artificial Intelligence
Prompt Battle
A game of AI-generated images and talk by Sebastian Schmieg
Scene
Want to attend a live prompt battle? Prompts are instructions that we give to artificial intelligence systems to magically create an image. The CCCB is hosting a battle where participants will compete to show their skill in creating prompts. The audience will then decide which are the most surprising or disturbing results.
Fito Conesa, Marion Balac, Huaqian Zhang and Jon Uriarte, toghether with other prompt creators, will take part in the battle, moderated by Mònica Rikic. The people taking part will have to act fast and decide whether to use tricks to make the machine follow the instructions faithfully, to confuse it, or to cooperate and experiment with unexpected forms of synthetic “intelligence”.
Talk by Sebastian Schmieg
As a warmup to the game, the artist Sebastian Schmieg will explain the origin of the prompt battle format and talk about the recent evolution of the realm of automatically generated images and its aesthetic and political implications. Sebastian Schmieg is a Berlin-based artists who devises playful interventions to investigate the algorithmic circulation of images, texts and bodies.
Schmieg is one of the developers of the prompt battle format, together with Florian A. Schmidt and a team of design students from HTW Dresden (Bernadette Geiger, Ella Zickerick, Emily Krause, Levi Stein, Lina Schwarzenberg and Robert Hellwig).
Although the production of synthetic images emerged recently as a popular creative phenomenon, the history of visual cultures is rich in examples of new technologies causing sudden changes in the production of images, capable of changing the zeitgeist of an era. From small-format cameras to Polaroids, to the current ubiquity of digital eyes and their editing and publishing tools, it seems to be ever easier and cheaper to generate images of the world.
With the advent of what is being referred to as promptism—that is, the ability to write suitable instructions for an automatic visual agent—another turning point has been reached: the photographic documentation of reality and its corresponding race to resolution are being replaced by the quasi-magical spells of AI. It does this by means of hyper-fast processes of trial and error, giving rise to endless permutations generated from massive data sets of an almost clandestine visual culture that is impossible to unravel. The battle will be preceded by a talk by Sebastian Schmieg, one of the developers of this format, who will be reflecting on the drift of the synthetic image.
A joint initiative of the CCCB and the DONE programme of Fundació Foto Colectania.
Curators: Bani Brusadin
Participants: Sebastian Schmieg
This activity is part of AI: Artificial Intelligence
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Prompt Battle
Talk by Sebastian Schmieg
Sebastian Schmieg, a Berlin-based artists who devises playful interventions to investigate the algorithmic circulation of images, texts and bodies, explains the origin of the prompt battle format and talks about the recent evolution of the realm of automatically generated images and its aesthetic and political implications.
