DïaloG in Barcelona

Urban Media Generative Art installation

by Refik Anadol and Maurice Benayoun,
AnalogNative / MoBen

CCCB, ISEA2022, Barcelona, Spain, June 2022

Production and presentation: MoBen, Analog Native, Neuro-Design Lab, ACIM, SCM, CityU HK, Espronceda, MindSpaces S+T+Arts European Program, and MindSpaces HK, RGC HK

Photos by Sebastian Neitsch and Simon Weckert (AnalogNative)

Première indoor for ART MACHINES 2 conference and exhibition,
June 10-20 2020, School of Creative Media, Creative Media Center, City University of Hong Kong. Curators Tobias Klein, and Carlos Rodrigo.

The Art of DïaloG: Are we immigrants in a machine World?

Refik Anadol and Maurice Benayoun started the DïaloG project as an art experiment and an urban media art installation. Two artworks are facing each other. They are confronted with a world they don’t know, people and languages that don’t look like what they are used to. These generated entities are immigrants in this country and aliens in the Human World. DïaloG a is a public art, generative, interactive, and evolutionist project. It shows how the new status of artworks that experience mutations made possible by technology moved the object it used to be (sculpture in marble, painting on canvas) to a real subject. The art-subject, able to perceive its environment, dotted with memory, and afferent cognitive functions: artificial intelligence, artificial intentionality, and autonomous behavior, may also experience a new form of affectivity. Lost in a human-controlled world, the artwork is a strange stranger. It doesn’t look like us; it may express a complex behavior triggered by specific emotions – from fear to curiosity, from excitement to compassion – it may also activate a semi-organic process of assimilation based on the absorption of perceived information altering its own DNA. They want to learn and understand. What they perceive becomes part of their persona in constant mutation. With more time, they’ll grab bits of language from the public, interact with them, and even more: they will interact with one another. The Alien is the Other, and like highly elaborate robots, these affective machinery strive to decrypt the world as if it were necessary for art survival. In troubled times, when war, climate, or poverty induce large-scale migrations, these aliens offer the possibility to discover and experience the strangely familiar quest of interspecies and intercultural mutual understanding.

DïaloG is the brainchild of the research and reflection developed in the MindSpaces S+T+Arts EU collaborative research project on art-inspiring research in the urban environments affecting new forms of sociality.

The technical team in Hong Kong: Neuro design Lab: Tony Zhang Tian Yi, Sam Chan, Timmy Leung, Lisa Park So Young, Charlie Yip, Ann Mak.

Maurice Benayoun, Barcelona, 9 June 2022

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