Exhibition: Boy + Girl - This is What I Left You

Northart is excited to host an exhibition of artistic collaboration Boy + Girl from 12 July - 20 Agust 2022, with an opening on Saturday 9 July, 2pm – 4pm.

Boy+Girl is an artistic collaboration between Auckland-based artists Bryn Evans and Nikki McLay. They use conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI), Film and Design to share stories in new and unexpected ways and aim to create genuine moments of connection between humans and machines. Their work has been recognised with a wide range of press and awards, and they have given talks and workshops around the world.

This is What I Left You is a generative art project that uses Artificial Intelligence to reconstruct childhood memories of a family garden. Trained on a handmade dataset of almost 10,000 images collected from the garden itself, the machine forms its own memories using a process that mimics the human process of remembering - providing a visual record of what would otherwise remain invisible.

Over a period of 12 months during 2020 - 2021, Nikki McLay revisited the garden she spent many times visiting as a child - the home of her late Grandfather. In an effort to archive and reconnect with this emotional space she photographed around 10,000 images (the dataset) of plants, flowers and foliage, which has remained almost unchanged since he passed away 1985.

This dataset of 10,000 images was then used to train General Adversarial Network (GAN), an open source machine learning system using neural networks, that essentially mimic how our human mind forms memories - a mysterious process of recalling, rejecting and confirming.

This is What I Left You is part of an ongoing conversation around our collective responsibilities as architects of AI. How can the stories of our personal histories, traditions and cultures be used to create more meaningful future systems?

Image caption: Boy + Girl, 'Cactus 01', 2022, GAN generated image on Archival inkjet print on paper, 1000 x 1000mm.