‘Circuit Training’

Circuit Training, an interactive installation by AI art pioneer, Mario Klingemann, spotlights the constantly evolving relationship between humans and machines.

“The purpose of machines is to save us time,” says the artist. “But time is a resource we cannot store, so we have to spend it. More and more often, we’re spending that time with other machines which promise to make our investment interesting.” In this installation, Klingemann explores how a machine can increase its appeal and maximize the attention it gets by learning how to create visuals that humans want to see.

Visitors are first invited into a photo booth where the machine captures data on facial gesture, clothing and even the colours they’ve chosen to wear; this information is used to train the system’s neural networks. The machine then produces images which users are asked to judge. As Klingemann explains, this AI brain “needs human feedback to know what humans find interesting.”

Circuit Training is learning every day: it gathers data, generates new portraits or abstract imagery, analyses visitors’ attention ratios and incorporates the value judgements they share. With time and help from humans, this machine might well surprise us, proposing images that the artist had never envisaged.