MODERN GURU - Royal Château de Blois
Interactive Art Experience
Blois, France
Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness is an immersive new media installation that uses the intersection of art and technology to interrogate AI, environmental degradation, the future of humanity, and paths to finding our place in the digital age.
As AI trawls through the history of human cultural endeavour – mapping and mimicking human artistry, what does it create but outcomes that currently appear hollow? Whereas human-made creativity resonates on a different level and as humans, we can feel the authentic hand of the artist irrespective of how strange
the intention.
This artwork features a meld of mediums, technologies and imagery to communicate complex and challenging ideas. From a pile of denuded trees – alluding to the damaging environmental footprint every AI prompt creates – to a maze of bright and innocent slugs representing the disorienting power of the contemporary digital world.
Even the titular character Modern Guru raises questions about future sources of cultural production.
As the guru prints messages from his mouth generated by AI, ENESS contrasts the printing press (which revolutionised the dissemination of literature) with the advent of AI – the first technology in the history of humanity capable of writing its own story. What does this ominous capacity mean for the future of human cultural output? Will literature and new religious texts still bear the mark of human hands, or will AI begin to re-write the future?
Photography: Nicolas Wietrich
