Twisting Reality: Pinocchio Meets AI at MoMA
I wandered through the world of Pinocchio for the second time in a month: the first, when sprawled out on my sofa watching Guillermo del Toro’s magnificent twist on the childhood fable on Netflix. The second time was last week in New York’s Museum of Modern Art at the exhibit Crafting Pinocchio, del Toro’s how-to on creating a universe using wood, glue, wire, paint and two-and-a-half years of meticulous stop motion photography, adjusting every torso, mouth, eyebrow, hair and facial furl frame by frame, even creating kernels of discarded popcorn on the ground. There are assembled and disassembled versions of Geppetto, the wooden boy, the irrepressible cricket, the sad monkey Spazzatura (trash in Italian), and other characters with exchangeable mouths and eyebrows to fit their moods. There are elaborate sets and wire contraptions painted green so they won’t show up on camera for moving the puppets millimeter by millimeter. I have never been able to get my head around massive projects: buildings, bridges, subway systems or mindbogglingly complicated efforts like this. How are they organized? Fact is, Pinocchio was partially organized using Post-It notes.
But Wait, There’s More
Imagine tossing two centuries of art into a volcano. To get to the del Toro exhibit at MoMA, I had to walk past another show in the lobby, which whacked me aside my head in a totally different way: Unsupervised, by artist Refik Anadol. This two storey digital display, reminiscent of a lava lamp, was not organized by Post-Its, flow charts or spreadsheets but by Artificial Intelligence. Anadol scanned more than 200 years of MoMA art and stuffed it into an AI sausage maker which he asked to re-imagine the history of modern art: where it has been, where it could have gone and where it is going. Today’s ChatGPT breed of AI scrapes stuff off the internet and tries to make rational sense of it. But Anadol’s uses AI, according to MoMA’s description, to explore “fantasy, hallucination and irrationality.” Sensors around the exhibit input changes in light, movement and sound, plus the weather outside of the museum, making the images even more irrational, at least to my feeble but not artificial brain. A digital panel off to the side flashes with graphs and lights that show that the exhibit is thinking.
“I am trying to find ways to connect memories with the future,” says Anadol, “and to make the invisible visible.”
Whee!
Staring at it for awhile, I found that sometimes a sweet dream could turn into a nightmare. But I couldn’t stop watching.
I wonder how this apparatus would visualize Pinocchio. In a few years AI may even be able to make as good a movie.
But I cannot lie, lest my nose grow, I feel more comfortable in the realm of Post-Its and puppets.
Unsupervised, by Refik Anadol, is ongoing.
Guillermo del Toro – Crafting Pinocchio – Closes April 15th at MoMa
Jun 10, 2023 – Sep 17, 2023 Portland Art Museum
