Based in New York, Ben Snell is an artificial intelligence artist who uses contemporary techniques and traditional motifs to explore creation and automation. Seeking a humanistic approach to technology, Snell “listens to the inner dialogues of the machine” through drawings, images and sculptures created by AI.
With his background, skills and knowledge, Snell trained a computer called Dio to become a sculptor. The computer is named after Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and festivity.
Over time with practice, Dio is said to have developed its own style by sifting through museum collections and recreating classical sculptures from memory. “Dio intuitively began to break down each sculpture into its component parts, developing a visual vocabulary from which it could build up more complex shapes,” explained Snell.
With its newfound style, Dio generated a sculpture inspired by the classics. “I asked Dio to close its eyes and dream of a new form—one which has never before been seen,” said Snell.
“Possessing an uncanny figurative quality with a likeness to the forms of Brancusi, Arp, Hepworth and Moore, it questions the creativity, originality and agency of the machine: a computer tasked with distilling the essence of Greek and Roman sculpture,” added Snell.
After Dio had generated the sculpture, Snell proceeded to grind Dio into dust and used the material to form the sculpture.
“Thus, this sculpture is both the computer and the computer’s dream,” stated Snell. “In this afterlife, it holds in balance two disparate realities: product and process, the beingness of an object and the coming-to-beingness of an object. On one hand, the computer assumes a newfound physical agency in these reconfigured bits of silicon, copper, steel and plastic. On the other, traces of the computer’s invisible processing power live on in its bodily form and in the bits of matter containing its thoughts and memories. Endowed is a materiality upon the impossibly immaterial.”
“Just as the classics worked in stone and bronze, so too is this sculpture materially of our time, made from the raw material of computation,” added Snell.
