In a building that used to be a grocery store in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood this week, the future of art and technology converged in a display and discussion around how artificial intelligence is impacting creativity.
The event at The Grocery Studios, organized as part of this week’s Seattle Art Fair, featured a poet and a painter in the home studio of two artists/tech workers whose own career and personal pursuits illustrate how the intersection between art and tech can blend and blur.
“AI is blowing up and affecting all of our lives so much,” said Grocery Studios co-founder Janet Galore. “Artists have a very unique approach and an important lens through which we can understand this new tech.”
Keep reading for insights from the event:
The poet and AI
Sasha Stiles is an award-winning poet, artist and AI researcher regarded as a pioneer of generative literature and language art.
Her love of words, text-based art, fonts, typography and language is matched by a strong appreciation for science and technology. She’s not a trained computer scientist, but she’s become a leader in technology spaces including blockchain, NFTs, and generative AI. Her book “Technelegy” marries Stiles’ human voice and art with output generated by her so-called AI alter ego.
“I’ve always really believed that there is a very close affinity between poetry and technology,” Stiles said. That belief is at the core of a lot of the work that she’s been doing for years, “thinking about poetic language as a kind of code.”
‘I want my work to be read by the machines that are going to be writing texts going forward.’
— Sasha Stiles
For the past several years, Stiles has been collaborating with AI as a co-author, comparing her own human writing to outputs generated by AI. She does not shy from welcoming the writing and creative stimulation that natural language processing and generative AI both bring.
“AI systems that we are using more and more today, they’re not just a tool, they’re not just a technology,” Stiles said. “They’re linguistic innovation that has potential to continue to shape human consciousness, change the way we tell stories, change the way we think about ourselves, change the kind of narratives that we create as human beings, and really kind of push us forward into phases post-humanity.”
When it comes to being part of the training datasets that AI relies on, Stiles pushes back against those who would fear having their work “ingested.”
“I want to be part of a cultural conversation, I want my work to be read,” she said. “And I want my work to be read by the machines that are going to be writing texts going forward.”
The painter and AI
Jason Puccinelli has been a Northwest artist for 25 years, with work ranging from oil painting to commercial production design. At The Grocery Studios he was showing paintings from a recent solo show called “Mimic,” in which he repainted images by hand that were generated by his prompts to AI.
Puccinelli said his work is the opposite of what Stiles is doing, where she’s taking traditional forms of art like poetry and language and putting them into a modern technological form.
“I’m analyzing science and technology and what’s happening now and trying to put it back into an older form,” he said.
‘Next year, the next five years, things are gonna get really weird.’
— Jason Puccinelli
The result was a series of evocative works mixing robot and human figures, “celebrating together over bacchanalian feasts in dining rooms straight out of a 19th century brasserie,” as his show description read.
For Puccinelli, the reverse direction of his work — painting what the AI generated rather than having the AI interpret his work — was important. He’s troubled by the ease with which some creators might turn to AI and not put in the work of creating art.
“If you’re a mountain climber, obviously the goal is to get to the summit. But climbing the mountain is really the thing that makes the summit so spectacular,” Puccinelli said. “It’s the hard work getting there. Stripping that away and just teleporting to the summit, I think there’s a lot lost.”
Puccinelli isn’t sure what to make of AI. After doing his paintings, he’s frightened by it, and amazed.
“Next year, the next five years, things are gonna get really weird,” he said. “As artists, we have to be diligent, to really take the reins a little bit and be responsible with it.”
Tech workers, artists, studio owners
The hosts for the event are accomplished and celebrated artists in their own right — and tech veterans. Demi Raven and Janet Galore are the owners — and inhabitants — of The Grocery Studios, a former grocery store in Beacon Hill that now serves as a creative exhibition space and their home.
Raven is a painter, carpenter and William S. Burroughs aficionado with a degree in computer science from the University of Washington. His day job is working on Prime Air drone delivery at Amazon.
‘Artists have a very unique approach and an important lens through which we can understand this new tech.’
— Janet Galore
Asked if art informs his work at Amazon, or vice versa, Raven said there are similarities from a creative standpoint.
“Some of the habitual qualities of getting into something very deep and having a headspace and being able to puzzle it out, I think are in tandem,” he said, adding that there is a benefit to having a creative process and a creative way of approaching problems in tech. “I really like to think about things very broadly and outside of a known domain.”
Galore is a multi-faceted artist with a degree in pure mathematics from the UW and 25 years of experience in tech as a UX designer, creative director, and video game producer. She’s worked at Microsoft and Amazon, among other places, and is currently at Google.
She learned early on that she wanted to do art, but didn’t want to make money with art. She was lucky enough to discover a career that allowed her to be creative and technical at the same time, and get paid for making entertainment or things that are useful.
“I had a very meandering journey through different jobs, but really settled on being a user experience designer,” she said. “And in my artwork, I’m very interested in human cognition and perception and how we relate to the world, which is a huge part of user experience design.”
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