A.I. Ball addresses the emergence of artificial intelligence and the competing forces shaping its development and impact.
Four match-ups of duelling microchips face off. They take turns to task each other with mathematical problems. While a chip is processing a problem, a steel ball drifts slowly towards it. If solved, the ball changes direction and it’s the other chip’s turn. The faster a problem is solved, the faster defence can switch to offence. If the ball reaches a chip, the game simply resets and starts over, locking the equally matched adversaries into an endless tug-a-war.
The artwork lends its form from Mindball — a game that uses EEG to allow human participants to move a ball by manipulating their own turbulent brain activity, as opposed to the more methodological and relentless computations in A.I. Ball.
The setup reminds us of a sporting event, but its never-ending nature suggests that it’s a zero sum game. This is comparable to how machine-learning works; in a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) two A.I models repeatedly prompt and test each other with sets of data in order to train a prediction algorithm that’s continuously perfected but never concluded.
A.I Ball is currently showing at the New Technological Art Awards in Ghent, 2025. On until June 8.
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
Microchips, slider, timber, metal legs, metallic spheres
