The “Words as Art” exhibition at the Marco Island Center for the Arts highlights how technology can transform traditional photographic art into dynamic, thought-provoking pieces.
Executive Director Hyla Crane explained how the show evolved.
“Each piece of artwork started with a prompt and different kinds of AI programs to create the images that ended up on the wall. It is a very robust exhibition, a very colorful exhibition,” Crane said.
Visitors will find a range of works that challenge perceptions and invite deeper contemplation on the role of AI in contemporary art. The way the resulting work is hung is as interesting as the artwork itself.
“The decision was made to exhibit the work not framed, which meant we had to be a little more creative about how it was hung,” Crane explained. “The gallery committee came up with this rather unique way of using clips and nails. We think it's sort of fun.”
Crane hopes patrons take notice of the AI-assisted images on the gallery’s back wall.
“We have an entire section that is celebrating Hispanic and Latin culture with AI, which was part of Arte Viva countywide celebration of Hispanic art and culture that's been going on for the last several years,” noted Crane.
“Words as Art” is on display through Nov. 23.
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Photographer Jim Robellard curated this exhibition, which includes digital works by seven artists including himself. The others are Wes Bloemker, Sue Christensen, Art David, Karen Lund, Mahlon Stacy and Donna Sutton.
While AI was at the center of the creative process, the works in this exhibition are examples of digital art.
The term “digital art” refers any form of artistic work that utilizes digital technology as an essential part of its creation, including digital painting, 3D modeling, video art, generative art, and more.
Some museums, galleries and artists still reject digital art as fine art. Even more seek to exclude modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality. But the introduction of technology into the creative process actually dates back to Robert Rauschenberg’s groundbreaking work with Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in the 1960s.
That collective was formed in 1966 by Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman and engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer to promote collaborations between artists, engineers and scientists. E.A.T. culminated in a number of projects that utilized advanced technology. Some were rather absurd, like Rauschenberg’s “Mud Muse,” a room-size aluminum-and-glass vat that held thousands of pounds of mud which responded to viewers as they moved through the room. But ever since, technological tools have gained acceptance as mediums of artistic expression just like paint, found objects, marble, metal and wood.
Nevertheless, the art world has been slow to accept AI-created or assisted artworks.
“As philosopher Alice Helliwell from Northeastern University London argues, if we can consider radical and divergent pieces like Duchamp's urinal and Tracey Emin's bed as art proper, how can something created by a generative algorithm be dismissed?” wrote Claudia Baxter in an October 21, 2024 article for the BBC. “After all, both were controversial at the time and contain objects that haven't technically been created by an ‘artist's’ hand.”
Baxter goes on to say that artificial intelligence need not signify the end of art as many fear. “Instead, they can help to kickstart an artistic metamorphosis and move us towards totally different ways of seeing and creating.”
This is the thrust of “Words as Art.”
“The exhibition is at the intersection of photography and AI, where science and art merge together to create something quite beautiful,” Crane observed.
AI systems take a text description called a prompt and generate an image that interprets the prompt. A prompt is a set of words provided by the user. The program or model then uses those words to develop an image.
In essence, the model interprets the words according to how the model was trained.
Short prompts allow the model to create images with greater freedom.
For example, the prompt for Jim Robellard’s “Little Black Dress” was simply “oil painting of an elegant woman in a black dress.”
Longer, more specific prompts focus the model into exact interpretations.
For example, the prompt for Karen Lund’s “Piano Woman” was “a surreal art deco and Gustav Klimt-inspired painting of a woman in a flowing mosaic gown made of piano keys and golden geometric patterns where the dress transforms into swirling keyboards and blends seamlessly into a vibrant background of spirals, music and golden light.”
The system has been trained on vast data sets of images and their descriptions. From that data, it learns how styles, objects and colors are represented.
AI can apply the style of any artist to an image. For example, an AI model that’s trained in the art of van Gogh can turn a photograph into something that looks like a van Gogh painting. It can also fill in missing parts of an image, remove unwanted elements or change details, for example, replace a cat with a dog or color a daytime sky with sunset colors.
The artists in “Words as Art” used a bevy of programs (models) including Bing, Adobe, Firefly, ChatGPT, MidJourney, Flux and Ideogram
To be clear, AI does not replace the artist. It serves more as a collaborator or tool. The artist provides the idea or concept (what to generate and why), the prompt, edits and provides feedback and then chooses which outputs are meaningful and worth refining. So digital art that utilizes AI is a technological blend of human imagination and machine generation.
The exhibition opened Oct. 6, and many of the visitors who’ve seen the exhibit were surprised to learn that the exhibiting artists are mid- to late career photographers.
“A lot of people assumed these were very young artists because they were using AI and technology, yet most of these artists are mature individuals who have been working for quite some time,” Crane noted.
The exhibiting artists had something else in common, the intention to use AI and an array of other digital art tools to create fine art.
“In all instances, they tried to keep a fine art element in the final product,” Crane observed. “They weren’t creating anime or other forms that looked like works of art. They were creating traditional works of fine art. It's a beautiful exhibition and we are very proud that we had the opportunity to present their work. It's been very well received.”
Although Robellard had been taking photographs for his high school yearbook with a 35mm Canon, he began exploring digital photography in earnest after his wife bought him a Canon 5DMkII in 2010.
“It opened up the world of digital photography and the immediacy of its amazing images and the world of color,” Robellard stated He urged all photographers to embrace “the new tools of photography, such as Lightroom and Photoshop” along with generative AI.
Among Robellard’s works are three black and white studies, “Together,” a street photography image of a man and woman walking down a New York City street in the rain; “Foggy Night,” an Ansel Adams-inspired image of a man walking on a railroad platform on a dark rainy night; and “Waiting,” a portrait of an attractive young woman waiting for the subway in the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Reading the prompts, determining the model the artist employed and enjoying the resulting image can fill a morning or afternoon with intrigue, joy and satisfaction.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
