arebyte Gallery are pleased to announce Real-Time Constraints, a group exhibition featuring works by artists working within the realms of artificial intelligence, algorithms, machine learning, big data, and interventions in web-based platforms. The exhibition brings forward the complexities of the present-tense in light of the emergence of such technologies through works which are generated using real-time information pulled from the internet, or other sources including news items, message exchanges, memes and image banks. The works look critically at the current state of automated and autonomic computing to provide alternative narratives to data-driven and algorithmic approaches, referencing fake-news, gender bias and surveillance.

Taking the form of a browser plug-in, the exhibition reveals itself as a series of pop-ups where the works are disseminated over the duration of a typical working day, interrupting the screen to provide a ‘stopping cue’ from relentless scrolling, email notifications and other computer-centered, interface-driven work.  Real-Time Constraints presents itself as a benevolent invasion - the size, quantity, content and sound of the pop-ups have been decided upon by each artist to feed into the networked performance. The exhibition is experienced through a synchronised global approach where viewers encounter the same pop-ups at the same time no matter where they are, amplifying the exhibition’s disturbance of mundanity across every time zone.  

Real-Time Constraints makes its primary argument through a reconfiguration of the usually annoying and uninvited browser pop-up, turning what is typically a tool of the system (and its owners) into a user-centric 'stopping cue.' Stopping cues were most prevalent in the 20th Century as a way to signal the end of something, the space in between one activity and the next. Stopping cues imposed a choice for the viewer: do you want to continue watching/reading/listening, or do you want to do something else? They also make available the mental space one needs to digest what they've just experienced, enabling useful processing of information, and thus, satisfaction through action. 

The way we consume media today is such that there are no stopping cues, there is no design in place that allows us to question our behaviour; social media applications, news sites, streaming services, email and messaging services are a bottomless source of mindless scrolling. Real-Time Constraints  invites critical reflection on the systems and processes we are embedded in all day long and allows viewers to take a break from the animated bombardment of working online, albeit unannounced, to be a welcome distraction.

Events Programme

Opening Event (Online)
Fri 24 July 20
Join the artists for the opening of Real-Time Constraints where they discuss their work.

Machine learning as an artist tool: disruption and intervention for change in 2020
Panel discussion moderated by Luba Elliott and Rebecca Edwards, with Gretchen Andrew, Ben Grosser, Libby Heaney, Sofia Crespo, and Joel Simon and others.
6 Aug, 7 - 8:30pm BST

Join some of the artists from the exhibition as they talk with Luba Elliott about bias in datasets, the origins of AI technologies, privacy and surveillance, and how we might bring about change in the AI industry.

Watch the event recording here:

Exhibition Booklet

Guest-written texts by Luba Elliot and arebyte curator Rebecca Edwards

Search Engine Artist and Internet Imperialist Gretchen Andrew, best known for her playful hacks on major art world institutions, unveils a new series of work that actively reprograms the artificial intelligence underlying the global internet. These new works, referred to as “vision boards,” appear as top search results through her unique process of using the failures of the internet to make her own dreams come true. AI is inherently backward-looking and susceptible to being reprogrammed through knowledge of the internet’s structure, and Gretchen exploits this by rewriting existing representations of reality by using a search engine’s own rules and limitations against itself.

Gretchen Andrew is a Search Engine Artist and Internet Imperialist who programs her vision boards to manipulate the internet with art and desire. She trained in London with the artist Billy Childish from 2012-2017. In 2018 the V&A Museum released her book Search Engine Art. Gretchen’s work has recently been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Artnet News, Dazed, Hyperallergic, Artillery and The Financial Times. https://www.gretchenandrew.com/

Sofia Crespo’s Artificial Remnants is an ongoing exploration of artificial life using machine learning to generate new insectile species from real-world datasets. Questioning how we engage with the rich diversity of the natural world in virtual, digital space, the work celebrates natural diversity of insectile life in the form of creating new specimens that are digital natives. The work addresses the vulnerability of non-human species and the need for mapping them, and archiving them, before it’s too late.

Sofia Crespo is an artist working with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. On the side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques. https://sofiacrespo.com/

DISNOVATION.ORG’s Predictive Art Bot generates new concepts for artworks based on current media discourse from diverse fields including politics, environment, culture and health. The bot is powered by an algorithm that identifies and combines keywords to come up with  concepts for artworks in a fully automated fashion. These concepts range in style from the prophetic to the absurd, encouraging unusual associations of ideas and breaking through echo chambers by automating the human creative process. 

DISNOVATION.ORG is a working group at the intersection of contemporary art research and hacking. They develop situations of disruption, speculation and debate, in order to question the dominant techno-psitivist ideologies, and to stimulate post-growth narratives. They edited The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piract. Their research includes artworks, curation and publications. In 2018 they received a Design Trust Grant (Hong Kong) for research about China’s Shanzhai Culture. They are currently visiting researchers at The University of California, Irvine. http://disnovation.org/

In Zizi, Jake Elwes presents a procession of faces of drag artists in constant transition generated from data using machine learning. Drag is a queer performance form that celebrates and challenges gender and otherness and Zizi’s gender, identity, race, whether they are real or artificial, is all uncertain. The work tackles the lack of representation in datasets often used by facial recognition systems, and disrupts these systems by retraining them with the addition of drag and gender fluidity. This causes the weights in the neural network to shift away from the normative identities it was originally trained on. Here the constraints around representation are lifted, celebrating difference and ambiguity within bodies as well as questioning bias in our data driven society.

Jake Elwes is an artist living and working in London. His recent works have looked at machine learning and artificial intelligence research, exploring the code, philosophy and ethics behind it. In his art Jake engages with both the history and tropes of fine art and the possibilities and consequences of digital technology. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL), London in 2017. https://www.jakeelwes.com/

Ben Grosser’s work Tracing You presents a website’s best attempt to see the world from its visitors’ viewpoints. By cross referencing visitor IP addresses with available online data sources, the system traces each visitor back through the network to its possible origin. The end of that trace is the closest available image that potentially shows the visitor’s physical environment. Tracing You provokes questions surrounding accuracy of data sources, the locality of visitors and how a computational system analyzes this, why that system might want to “see” a visitors environment, and about who (or what) is reading the web.

Ben Grosser focuses on the cultural, social, and political effects of software. What does it mean for human creativity when a computational system can paint its own artworks? How is an interface that foregrounds our friend count changing our conceptions of friendship? Who benefits when a software system can intuit how we feel? To examine questions like these, he constructs interactive experiences, machines, and systems that make the familiar unfamiliar, revealing the ways that software prescribes our behavior and thus, how it changes who we are.

In Libby Heaney’s Elvis, we are presented with the current possibilities of deepfake technologies, which the artist employs here to portray herself as Elvis and Elvis as herself. At first glance, we assume that the screens show the original Elvis, but as we look closely we recognise some of Libby’s features. These portraits present a non-binary Elvis, imagining the singer as a womxn. The artist explores the nature of gender, performativity and consumption through digital technologies, as well as subverting the notions of the male genius.

Libby Heaney's moving image works, performances and participatory & interactive experiences span quantum computing, virtual reality, AI and installation. Heaney's practice seeks to subvert the capitalist appropriation of technology, the endless categoriziations and control of humans and non-humans alike in pursuit of neverending profits, causing accelerating alienation, prejudice and division (as well as an ever increasing depletion of resources). Instead, Heaney uses tools like machine learning and quantum computing against their 'proper' use, to undo biases and to forge new expressions of collective identity and belonging with each other and the world. http://libbyheaney.co.uk/

With GANbreeder, Joel Simon enables the audience to take part in making AI art collaboratively in real-time. The tool allows users to pick images as ‘parents’ from which new images are generated. These can then be shared so that others can use them to make further images. GANbreeder explores the notions of authorship, creativity and collaboration through a straightforward interface that is designed to enable anyone to contribute, enrich and promote the art breeding mechanism and its associated community. 

Joel Simon is a multidisciplinary artist and toolmaker who studied computer science and art at Carnegie Mellon University before working on bioinformatics at Rockefeller University. He is currently pursuing Morphogen, a generative design company and developing Artbreeder, a massively collaborative creative tool and network. His works are somewhere in the region between art, design and research and inspired by the systems of biology computation and creativity.