(2022)
Silvia Weidenbach X Jon Emmony
Technology allows us to see, and to experience, the world in entirely new ways, that until recently felt like distant science fiction. Our lives are spent planning trips via the interfaces of virtual maps. News and information are matched to our interests via complex, unknowable algorithms. With the advent of NFTs, the ownership of art and product have shifted into a new arena, free from traditional economic systems and into a new realm of anonymity via the blockchain. Artificial Intelligence is common across all of these new ways of existing, and it is this tool that interests us in the pursuit of creating. How will artists and makers utilise AI in the future? What results from these new types of collaborations?
Our project, Infinite Loop, explores these topics — feeding an Artificial Intelligence with historical rings, spanning over 3000 years of human creation (including pieces from the Antikensammlungen Munich, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg and The Alice and Louis Koch Collection in The Swiss National Museum, Zurich); each embedded with the desires, dreams and realities of the makers of the time. The AI learns from these pieces of jewellery — examining in its own way the meaning of materiality, form and features. Once it has learnt, it begins its own journey of creation — showing us infinite new rings that feel familiar yet somehow distant.