MACHINE LOVE: Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art

Why “Machine Love”?

The “machine” of the exhibition title is not a reference to the Industrial Revolution machines of heavy industry, but a general term for computing and hardware technology altogether. In the early 20th century, a new era symbolized by the speed and dynamism of machinery was indeed dubbed the Machine Age, and championed in many artistic fields, but this exhibition turns its attention to the art of a new machine age, intimately connected to 21st-century developments in computers and the internet. “Love” calls to mind the ardent emotions directed toward games and machines, from affection to jealousy, fear to exhilaration. Furthermore, it also poses the philosophical question of whether in a future of increasingly sophisticated AI, robots, androids, cyborgs and such could be subjective agents possessed of their own consciousness and emotions.

Exhibition Features and Highlights

Articulating a New World through the Convergence of Expertise from a Diversity of Fields

Eleven individual and one group of highly acclaimed creators in the fields of contemporary art, design, gaming, and AI research will come together to present works created through collaborations with fields such as biology, geology, philosophy, music, dance, and programming.

Experience a Fusion of Digital and Real

The processes used to make seemingly non-digital artworks, such as the paintings of Anicka Yi and sculptures of Adrián Villar Rojas, in fact, also employ a range of technologies. Meanwhile artists like Lu Yang and Jakob Kudsk Steensen, offer digital video works teamed with installations that feature a portion of the landscape or objects depicted therein, manifested in IRL space. Those viewing the exhibition will experience a sensation akin to contiguity of digital and real spaces.

Numerous Winners of Art and Media Art Prizes

For Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), Kim Ayoung received the Golden Nica (Grand Prize) in 2023 in the New Animation Art category at Prix Ars Electronica, one of the top international honors in the world of media art, and the first ACC Future Prize by the National Asian Cultural Center in South Korea in 2024. Lu Yang won the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year Award in 2022, while Hsu Chia-Wei won the Eye Art & Film Prize by Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) in 2024. Finally, for their work Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 (2023), Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler won the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize at Prix Ars Electronica, which honors artists who have brought innovation to media art.

Audience Participation in Interactive Works, and Indie Game Arcade

Visitors will be able to experience interactive works including the game version of Kim Ayoung’s Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, and Diemut’s El Turco / Living Theater (2024), which invites visitors to a debate with AI characters (* 1). For the Indie Game Arcade (* 2), Taniguchi Akihiko, media artist and advisor of this exhibition, has selected easy-to-play games with the theme of “I and Others.” Visitors will have the opportunity to play these games with one another.

* 1 Please click here for Information on when you can participate.
* 2 Indie games: Games created by individual, or small groups of developers with a strong experimental orientation not found in major games.