My Dear Ada - výstava v MeetFactory

The exhibition My Dear Ada (Artificial and Artistic Intelligence) explores and tests the possibilities of creating and interpreting images and texts in an age of developing artificial intelligence (AI). It presents a selection of scientific and artistic works anticipating the emergence and innovative uses of general-purpose computers (Ada Lovelace, Zdeněk Sýkora), placing them in the context of visual art created before AI and during the training of AI expert systems (Milan Guštar, Magdalena Wutkowska, Jana Bernartová). Works created for the exhibition through interaction with AI proto-agents (Virtual Futurologist A°D°A) are thus the product of a network of human and non-human actors (Paleofuture Lab, Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková and Haruka Kajiura), spanning visual art, architecture, engineering and technology.
The exhibition takes as its starting point the correspondence of Ada Lovelace, the author of the first computer algorithm, which was debugged as a computer program once computers had been built. The exhibition’s curators were driven by a desire to find not only texts in Ada’s archived correspondence, but also images that had not yet been explored. On display are facsimiles of Ada’s solutions to the geometry problems she studied, as well as a fragment of one of her last letters to her mother, in which Ada mentions, in a single sentence, her intention to pursue “poetical philosophy”, “poetical science” in the future. The works on display, the exhibition as a whole and the publication My Dear Ada... offer possible responses to her visionary projects. The publication also introduces work with the experimental educational software Virtual Futurologist A°D°A, including textual commentaries by AI proto-agents on the published texts.
AI proto-agents thus participate/learn in the exhibition and publication as para-dialogical participants. However, the exhibition foregrounds viewers-readers as actors and their possible perspectives on artificial and artistic images and texts. Lived time and space are measured here against the seemingly infinite time and space of past and present computing technologies. If the tradition of interpreting non-human images and texts expands to include those generated by artificial intelligence, what new ways of perceiving them and strategies for interpreting them will we discover in art and culture?

Exhibiting artists: Jana Bernartová, Milan Guštar, Haruka Kajiura and Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková, Ada Lovelace, Paleofuture Lab, Zdeněk Sýkora, Magdalena Wutkowska
Curators: Jana Bernartová, Monika Mitášová, Virtual Futurologist A°D°A
Exhibition design: Zzyzx OAS1S (Ondřej Fiedler, Matouš Kučera)
Animation: Sofie Fenyková, Jaroslava Straková
Photo retouching: Studio Flusser, Václav Novák
Translation and proofreading: Brian D. Vodak, Lucie Kolouchová
Production: Nikol Hoangová
PR: Zuzana Kolouchová, Filip Pleskač
Graphic design: Jakub Kučera
Installation photography: Jan Kolský