Museum Of Art + Light Opening In Kansas With An Industry-Leading Focus On Digital Art

Chadd Scott

November 3, 2024

When the Museum of Art + Light (MoA+L) opens on Friday, Nov. 8, in Manhattan, Kan., it will do so as the first in the world purpose built to give equal standing to conventional fine art–paintings and sculpture–immersive art–those big, room-filling, animated, video projection displays–and digital art. The first traditional museum with an entire gallery dedicated to collect and display digital art permanently.

Digital art as a feature, not a sideshow.

Partnering with Iconic, a leading digital art platform, MoA+L brings five of the world’s leading artists of the digital age to its De Coded Digital Gallery in an exhibition titled “Code & Canvas: Defining Digital Art in the Age of Blockchain.” This groundbreaking exhibition features both new and renowned pieces by Erick “Snowfro” Calderon, Tyler Hobbs, Sasha Stiles, Grant Yun, and Emily Xie.

For better or worse, digital is the medium of our times. American lives are digital. Screens. 1’s and 0’s. Code. Backlit. Computers.

The “Code & Canvas” artists, like photographers and filmmakers before them, are proving the technical marvels of their day can produce fine art.

“I grew up drawing and painting–loved doing it as a kid,” Hobbs told Forbes.com. “In high school, I got into programming, and when it was time to go to college, I ended up studying computer science, but I kept working on artwork in my in my free time. Even though my day job was a programmer, I was making art in the morning and evenings. Eventually, I decided to try to combine the two and create artwork through programming. That’s really when things took off for me. That’s when my work, to me, became interesting and my own personally unique work.”

Stiles, likewise, who also came of age as computers were taking over the world, a contemporary of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, established her creative roots in a centuries-old medium.

“I am a conventional poet from way back, my art medium is words,” she told Forbes.com. “I’ve been writing about technology, about my relationship to technology, for years and years and years, and in the course of that exploration, I’ve been incorporating multimedia tools and different technologies into my writing practice. I started incorporating motion graphics and sonic enhancement, and then in 2017 and ‘18, when language models–(Artificial Intelligence) generated text–started to surface in a major way, I started to explore the possibilities of using large language models and natural language processing in my poetic practice.”

Both produce what is known as generative art.

“Generative art is where the artist, rather than working specifically on crafting one image or one object, is thinking about crafting a system or a pattern or a process that creates the artwork,” Hobbs explains. “They’re removing themselves, somewhat, from exactly what happens, and instead, they’re focused on designing that system or process so that it makes the kind of things (the artist) tends to be interested in.”

The human artist writes the code or algorithm or “prompts” to AI what range of outputs they’re hoping to achieve, but it’s the computer producing the finished product. Generative artists tell the computer what to do, then the computer does the work.

“Every work is different, but in general, the code is describing things about how to choose colors, how to place shapes and objects, about the relationships between those shapes. Maybe it describes a simple pattern or a process of adding things to the image so that they fit well compositionally,” Hobbs continued. “I can make choices about all sorts of different aspects of the composition, of textures, of colors; the algorithm–I give it a certain opinion about what kinds of things to produce, so it definitely carries a particular esthetic that I want–but I write it in such a way that the algorithm involves randomness, so every output is surprising to me, and they’re all different.”

Conceptual art for the 21^st century. Instead of the idea being the most important aspect of the work, as Sol LeWitt said 1967, the input or code or prompt or algorithm, is.

Digital art challenging notions of what, and who, is creative, same as LeWitt and Duchamp did for previous generations.

“People that work in sciences and engineering and these kinds of fields, they’re actually very, very creative individuals,” Hobbs said. “Typically, programmers are some of the most creative people that I know. They’re just not used to thinking about being able to apply those capabilities in an artistic way. A lot of this is just about exposure, and those people even knowing that there’s a creative outlet for them.”

Back to generative art and how digital artists use code to instruct computers to create art.

“This is the hardest part of being a generative artist. This is really at the core of what generative art is. How do you make a process that will be both surprising and yet still express a type of vision that you that you have?” Hobbs said. “It’s about finding loose ways to describe those esthetics and trying really to discover in a concrete way, what is it about these relationships of colors or objects or shapes or compositions in the image that gives it the flavor that you want?”

MoA+L features an interactive station for Hobbs’ exhibition allowing visitors to experiment with his algorithm on-site to create new artworks.

“It’s more interesting to me to have an algorithm that’s a little bit risky; that’s how I arrive somewhere surprising, something that I would not have come up with from my own imagination alone,” Hobbs said. “That’s part of the power of generative art. It has the capability of escaping the limits of your own imagination. That’s part of the randomness and the surprise of the algorithm, part of what makes that so amazing.”

Computer code and algorithms and artificial intelligence not replacing human creativity, expanding upon it.

“What is it that occurs at the nexus of those two things, of human imagination and machine intelligence that does things that human intelligence alone can’t do, that we can’t see because our minds are too slow, too analog, too forgetful to understand,” Stiles said. “How can we use a machine mind with much better recall? How can we utilize that mind to help us write poems that help us see things that we wouldn’t otherwise see or feel, emotions that we wouldn’t otherwise feel, or connect with one another in ways that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to connect?”

Stiles has developed a bespoke large language model for her generative poetry using an underlying program. In addition to the billions of examples of written language the base program has “learned,” everything from Shakespeare to Dr. Dre, she has fed it all of her poetry and instructed it to use her original work as a primary influence for what it produces.

“It’s refracting my poetry through this prism of the entirety of humanity’s written record via GPT Two, GPT Three,” Stiles explained. “A lot of my human poems are inspired by and written explicitly after poets like Sylvia Plath and T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg and Octavia Butler and I wouldn’t be able to write what I write if I hadn’t absorbed all of their thinking and writing into my body and my brain. I feel like that’s what I’m trying to do with AI. I want my poems to be part of that. I want them to be part of this universal brain.”

The ”universal brain,” the giving over of all images, artworks, lyrics, literature, all human-generated creativity to artificial intelligence for it to do with what anyone asks it to do. Surely, there will be bad actors. Thieves. AI taking creativity–with or without permission–and allowing anyone to access and use, or abuse, it for their own ends.

Stiles shares an interesting outlook on the subject.

“I tend to think about AI as this massive repository of information that’s not unlike a canon of literature,” she said. “I’m a language and literature person, that’s what I studied in school, and I feel if you want to be part of a cultural conversation or be remembered in some way, you have to give up your work and let it be absorbed, and not just absorbed, but reappropriated, reinterpreted.”

AI is merely a tool, like a hammer, with multiple applications, some good, some bad. What distinguishes AI as a tool is its god-like power. Think of it like nuclear energy, a tool that can simultaneously provide endless clean electricity or obliterate the globe depending on how it’s used.

All of this is taking place in Manhattan. Kansas. An odd place for an experience at the leading edge of art, technology, creativity, and museums. Thanks for that goes to the museum’s founders, entrepreneurs and art collectors Tracey H. and Robert L. DeBruyn–Manhattan locals–and Ronald Bowman and Stanley E. Zukowfsky, all of whom rightly believe that communities outside city centers benefit from culture and museums same as city folk.

“It’s not New York, it’s not London, it’s not D.C., and what that means is that (MoL+A) becomes a draw for hundreds and hundreds of miles around for people to come to experience art and experience culture in person,” Iconic founder and CEO Chris Cummings said. “The single best introduction to software development or coding is through art and for kids to walk in and see that the technology they play with every day can be an entire career, an artistic career. That exposure at a young age is critical for someone thinking, ‘Oh, this is a pathway I can take.’ If you don’t have that exposure, often we’re preventing a kid from even realizing this and potentially being an artist.”

Every digital artwork in MoL+A exists on the blockchain with Iconic helping set a wallet up for the museum so anyone in the world can view the pieces.

The digital art on view at the museum will change the lives of some visitors. Others will glaze over. Same as at every other art museum in the world. Both reactions are valid.

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