Cognitive Technologies

Brian Droitcour argues that AI systems, in the hands of thoughtful artists, can become instruments for seeing the world differently and for reconsidering human perception. He reviews K. Allado-McDowell's The Known Lost at the Swiss Institute and Pierre Huyghe's In Imaginal at Marian Goodman Gallery, which he says use generative AI and robotics as collaborative agents. Allado-McDowell's installation proposes a monument to extinct species, with Midjourney images and seven volumes of Latin species names, while Huyghe's show includes Camata, a film made from robot-captured footage in Chile's Atacama Desert. Droitcour describes Huyghe's work as decentering the human and Allado-McDowell's as keeping the human at the center.