Alsino Skowronnek at the Center d'Art Contemporani Piramidón

ChatGPT, Dalle-2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion or ControlNetlleva are the picturesque names of the most innovative artificial intelligences (AI). Our days include hundreds of proposals for new AI formats that confront us, at the very least, with a debate about the ethics of technological use. Its goal is to create systems of algorithmic combinations with the purpose of imitating human intelligence to improve human capabilities. The author of the Excavation Trail exhibition, Alsino Skowronnek, uses these resources to create digital works inspired by the aesthetics of these technologies, which are intertwined with the emotionality that characterizes the human species.

Alsino Skowronnek considers himself a data designer, a map maker and a producer of visual artifacts. His work refers to the urban culture of graffiti, a traditionalist phenomenon that preserves the forms of its beginnings, in the 1970s on the streets of the United States. However, through digitization, he manages to break the codes of the symbolic language of the American artistic genre.

The exhibition captures the relationship between the interface and analog plastic arts, to reflect on learning processes and the changing patterns of human-computer interaction. The artist, who is in residence in the same building, combines spray with paint and pencil to generate works with a white base, in most cases; on this, unrecognizable shapes of black spray and linear pencil details, aligned with each other in a kind of irregular order.

With the concept of "artificial intelligence", the German artist puts on the table the frontiers of the intellectual, creative and emotional capacities of technology. For this reason, Skowronnek prefers to speak of "machine learning", which only emphasizes the ability to learn from data. For Skowronnek, data design and painting is a material resource to facilitate the creation and expression of emotional affections and meanings, as have been the typewriter or computers for literature. In this way he manages to dissociate the structure of an image to be able to freely associate it again. The creative process consists of recombining the images with textual fragments that arise from the artist's personal experience to reaffirm that the creations are preceded, consciously or unconsciously, by a trajectory and a historical-cultural heritage, far from a computational creation