It Had Already Started

How will we look back on the year 2021 that passed
with the COVID-19 pandemic?
Yamahyo Crossing by YAMAUCHI Shota and Uber
Existence by HANAGATA Shin capture people living
in the era shifting into that of the metaverse, referring
to digital contents and services that are increasingly
sought after amid the pandemic. Against the backdrop
of a social structure that became more distinct due to
the pandemic, the latter work can be connected to Who
else if not you? by Daniel WETZEL / TANAKA Miyuki
/ KOBAYASHI Keigo x UEMURA Haruka / HAGIWARA
Shunya x N sketch, which makes viewers conscious of
their position in a community and of society. Furthermore, social distancing gave inspiration to S . P . A . C .
E . by ELEVENPLAY x Rhizomatiks, which proposes
new physical and visual expressions by combining photo shooting, machine learning, and image processing
technologies.
In 2021, more than a year had passed since the
pandemic started. What left an impression was the
performative works, which carefully scoop up a foregrounding and accelerating, already-changing reality,
instead of “the extraordinary” itself, and examine or use
it as a catalyst for an experiment.
As a final note, expressions using AI technology in
fact outnumbered works inspired by the pandemic. The
number may have already been on the rise for the past
few years, yet the motivations and interests of artists
span a wide range from the possibility of societal changes and environmental control via machine intervention,
reconsideration of the machine-human relationship and
a new aesthetic arising from there, to practical issues
such as social disparities caused by the data set bias.
Unfortunately, the level of technical achievement and
its relevance to the final expression were sometimes
hard to evaluate, based on the application documentation alone, leaving some issues. However, I expect a
deepening of AI and creativity in the future, including
examination of learned information and outputting it
as expression.