TORSHAVN, Oct 21 — Pablo Picasso and Hilma af Klint never visited the Faroe Islands, an archipelago located in the North Atlantic. But a new exhibition at Listasavn Føroya, an art museum in the island country’s capital, Tórshavn, brings together a series of paintings that suggests otherwise. But in fact they have all been created with an artificial intelligence.
The exhibition “/Imagine the Faroe Islands” gives the visitors of the Listasavn Føroya the chance to discover about 40 artworks dreamed up by Midjourney. This artificial intelligence software is able to create images from a written request, like the programs Dall-E 2 and Imagen. Even more impressive, it can imitate the “styles” of great artists such as Hilma af Klint, Andy Warhol, Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse.
All the artificial images created by Midjourney for this exhibition represent landscapes of the Faroe Islands. However, this 1400 sq-km territory takes on radically different perspectives depending on the artist whose style Midjourney emulated.
The software drew inspiration from the five portraits of Marilyn Monroe that Andy Warhol made in 1964, in order to give a pop touch to the Faroe Islands. The result is a representation of several sheep back to back in bright, saturated and contrasting colours. A choice that might seem surprising if the archipelago was not home to 80,000 of these animals, compared with just 50,000 human inhabitants.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, the Faroe Islands take on a much more mysterious and darker face in a painting by Mijourney “inspired by Dorothea Tanning.” The landscape takes on a much calmer and brighter outlook when the artificial intelligence program slips into the skin of Danish painter Anna Ancher.
Despite their different styles, these paintings of the Faroe Islands have one and the same goal: to encourage the general public to think about the role of artificial intelligence in artistic creation. Is it just a tool? Can Midjourney, Dall-E and other AI technologies replace artists? The idea may seem far-fetched, but not irrelevant. “From time to time, an art museum needs to generate discussion about the concept of art,” said Lykke Grand, the director of Listasavn Føroya, to the Smithsonian magazine. “There is nothing static about art. On the contrary, contemporary art has always experimented, investigated and pushed boundaries.”
But art fans can rest assured. AI is not about to compete with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Salvador Dali and Claude Monet. “In the end the artificial intelligence generator can only create artwork as original as the rules of its algorithm. Therefore, it all comes down to the human input. And imagination,” the Listasavn Føroya explains on its site.
In this spirit, the museum has installed computer stations in different spaces to provide visitors with the opportunity to create their own artificial images with the Midjourney software. The machine is not ready to replace human artists—yet.
The exhibition “/Imagine the Faroe Islands” can be seen until October 30 at Listasavn Føroya in Tórshavn. — ETX Studio
