SUMMARY

Taavi Suisalu (TS): The Arctic comes with this whole idea of a heroic figure: expeditions, discovery, the drive to push beyond the horizon, to uncover the unknown. But the hero figure also carries its own problems: if it’s someone who goes off to essentially colonise a place with its own cultures and ecosystems, then it makes me wonder whether artificial intelligence is becoming today’s version of that hero, charting new, unknown territories.

This ties into another question: will technological innovation really solve our ecological problems? The concept of artificial general intelligence comes with heavy connotations, almost like a magic wand. As if we didn’t have to change our own behaviour or our relationship with other beings. People assume that AI will have a massive influence on everyday life and social structures, yet so much about it remains unknown. Machine-learning models are more specific and strip away some of that mystique. In this exhibition, I’m using the ChatGPT, which is widely used and easy to access.

Whether AI becomes a hero, a trickster or a fool is something time will show. What I mean is that it seeps quietly into so many fields, and there’s a real risk that we’ll increasingly outsource our cognitive abilities to it without fully understanding how these models actually work.

I still think of myself as a fairly traditional artist: I also make works that are simply photographs or events. I’m drawn to broadly human questions, and my take on technology is quite wide. So in the traditional sense, I don’t think of myself as a technology artist – or let’s say, I don’t see myself as a media artist. Technology is just the clay that happens to suit my hands best. But I’ve started bringing other things into the mix as well. I don’t want to work only with speculation or purely on the symbolic level; I also want my ideas to take shape in physical space. I call those small utopias.