Media artist Jukka Hautamäki is dealing with thematics related to the future of visual arts: what kind of art there will be in year 2050? Who is making it, to whom and how it will be presented?

Restituo (latin.) means restoring, reinstating, reinvesting, re-edifying. The synthesis of images, based on neural networks and artificial intelligence, is a seamless evolutionary process. Hautamäki uses for example selfies and synthetic faces of people who do not exist, as training images for the AI.

About invisible information in an image. AI needs to be fuelled by various media archives; video clips, photographs, text, sound. Data is mined as raw material for AI’s requirements. Our present times of (big) data has been described as new neolithical era (Steyerl, McLuhan).

A digital, reproducible and inexhaustible virtual artist is probably a wet dream for neoliberal political idealists. A visual artist is, after all, a sort of product, shaped by it’s enviroment, a facilitator of the arts? Visual arts is thus gradually becoming like entertainment industry. How it is possible to use AI as a tool, media for critical studies of these described phenomena?

RESTITUO I & II

Video documentation of generative AI artwork.

Restituo I & II consists of over 700+700 curated GAN (generative adversarial network) produced images.

RESTITUO I

https://vimeo.com/397625931

RESTITUO II

https://vimeo.com/397636766

Credit: Hannu Töyrylä, DCGan based Python machine learning script.