Exhibition Review: In the Middle of Nowhere ll by Jonas Lund

May 23

Written By DAB

Exhibition on view:
May 5 – June 4, 2023
Wednesday through Saturday
12:00 – 6:00 pm

Location:
ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY
Unit 9, 472 Hackney Road
London E2 9EQ

*In the Middle of Nowhere ll by Jonas Lund at ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY*

We’re all for artists utilizing AI to create cutting-edge art, so when DAB was invited to the private viewing of Jonas Lund’s show at Annka Kultys Gallery to meet the artist, there was no way we’d pass.

Jonas Lund is a Swedish conceptual artist who creates mixed media works that critically reflect on our modern age network systems and power structures. His work spans across mediums such as painting, sculpture, photography, digital environments as well as performance. In the Middle of Nowhere II is the artist’s first solo show with Annka Kultys Gallery and is the second iteration of his exhibition at Office Impart in Berlin which was showcased earlier this year.

This collection is especially intriguing to us for one reason — it is fully co-created with ChatGPT.

Lund explores power dynamics and concepts around labor, agency, and authorship through his art. He speculates about the consequences of increasing digitalization of contemporary culture and of the blurring the line between human and machine intelligence. For the exhibition Jonas Lund collaborated with AI tools such as large text-based language models like GPT4 and text-to-image tools like Stable Diffusion.

There is no denying that the new paradigm in the art world is the utilization of artificial intelligence. While some artists are concerned if the AI will replace them, many artists have been enhancing their creative expressions with the help of large language models and text-to-image generators.

This debate sets the perfect environment for Lund’s conceptual art — we are in a corporate office whose CEO is struggling to keep pace with the ever-advancing technology even though is using ChatGPT to create art and drive profits. There’s potted plants and dull office furniture, and an art collection of AI-generated tapestries, videos, and automated affirmations.

His cleverly-titled collection being his humorous response, Jonas Lund openly mocks all the worry related to machine intelligence art. To the artists who vocalize their fear and anxiety created by AI, his response is a glitchy video art of human support groups. To the corporate working class who has been anxious that machines will replace them, the artist responds with woven tapestries of cats in offices and elephants in suits.

In the Middle of Nowhere ll is self-reflexive, self-conscious, somewhat existential — and it’s brilliant.

“Ultimately In the Middle of Nowhere II takes us into a space of speculative fiction to reflect on the realities of AI in artistic production. Lund’s exhibition serves as a salient reminder that this relationship is a two-way street: the ways we prompt and prime machinic output inevitably has a kickback effect on broader notions of ‘human’ creativity and authorship, ideas that require vital revaluation in the present. By interrelating satire, speculation, and AI-influenced value production through corporate lore, In the Middle of Nowhere II problematizes the distinctions previously held between human and machinic creative labour. It opens a window into a scenario where those relationships—and their material outputs—are fully entangled, exposing the tensions and possibilities of AI as a creative collaborator.”

— AKG PRESS RELEASE