Daisy Bell: Philip Grözinger

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Daisy Bell ... when Harry Dacre wrote the humorous song of the same name in 1892, in which a lover asked his beloved to ride tandem, he had no idea that his song would be sung seventy years later by a self-conscious computer, as a death melody for his own switch-off. This happened in one of the most important science fiction movies, A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick (1968). Seven years earlier, in 1961, IBM had already used the song to introduce the first computer that sings a text, i.e. synthesizes speech.

Speaking computers are nothing special anymore, but the computer HAL 9000 in Kubrick's A Space Odyssey not only speaks, it also has self-confidence. When it is switched off step by step by its human opponent, because it had tried to sieze power, it speaks the words: "I'm afraid. My mind is going. I can feel it." HAL reflects on his own mind. This moment of emergence, when a computer becomes aware of itself, still lies in the future in the real world. This consciousness is till a human, at least a biological privilege. It is possible that this will change in the future. 

In the exhibtion Daisy Bell, artificial intelligence becomes the theme, especially the moment of emergence. This moment, in which something new emerges that is more than the sum of its parts, not only becomes the object of the paintings, it actaually takes place in a walk-in installation. The visitors have to walk through a narrow hose that stretches from the middle of the exhibtion hall to one of the walls. The passage through this hose has something narrow and dystopian about it. At the end of the hose, a video is shown in which moving images are created by artificial intelligence. The source material from which the computer creates the video are the images of Grözinger's paintings shown in the exhibtion. The computer thus seems to compete with the artist. Emergent are the moving images, whose forms are quasi mutants from Grözinger's pictures. But the computer isn't aware that it is making art. It doesn't even know that it is making pictures. It creates them, that's amazing enough but unlike HAL it will never say "I can feel it."

Grözinger's pictorial objects are already futher along. Grözinger is interested in the relationship between computer scientist and algorithm or, to put it religiously, between curator and creature. As soon as the moment of singularity is reached, in which the computer improves itself by means of artificial intelligence, it will probably come to a cultural-historical turn. While in cultural history the creator, God, always remained superior to his creatures, this can be reversed in the field of artificial intelligence at the moment of singularity: What if the machine becomes superior to the machinist, the creature emancipates itself from the Creator? And what if the machine attains consciousness or even self-confidence in another moment of emergence? Grözinger has imagined these moments by showing two paintings next to each other, in each of which similiar beings can be seen in abstract form. It is not clear which one is the original and which is the emancipated image, which is creator and which is the creature. Therefore, the pairs of pictures are not diptychs, but individual pictures. Once created, the creature is independant of the Creator. While man in his independance can only claim that God is dead, but remains attached to morality himself. The moment may come when the machine will actually be superior to man. The moment when the machine says to man (Creator): "You are dead."