MODERN GURU AND THE PATH TO ARTIFICIAL HAPPINESS
Art Gallery Exhibit
Yarrila Arts and Museum
Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness is a statement about the strangeness of AI and its carnivorous appetite for human creative output. 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? By contrast, 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 is.
Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness is an immersive new media installation that uses the intersection of art and technology to explore modern paths to happiness through a warped world of digital technology and AI.
At the entrance to Modern Guru, visitors navigate the Glitchy Wood, a series of twisted trunks with fractured screen-like patterns. Stick insects hover nearby chanting Modern Guru’s incantations – eyes flickering with ones and zeros as if diseased with the code of their world. Fragile and odd, they guard Modern Guru as he rests against an LED horizon, waiting to dispense reconstituted wisdom generated by AI.
Modern Guru himself is a translucent ovoid with four huge digital eyes, in repose above a ceremonial ring of LEDs. From his mouth flows a ream of absurdist messages, and in a statement about the true nature of lived experience, a new message is delivered when visitors take a photo of him – a missive only produced for those who seek to photograph life rather than live in the moment.
Unlike AI-generated art, in Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness, there is no mimicry, no dulling or muddying of artistry through replication, overlay and imitation; there is only a human artist’s vision and the digital tools at their disposal, reconfigured into charmingly eerie scene.
