Carnegie Mellon's Miller ICA Presents "Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI" Oct. 5-Feb. 3

Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Institute for Contemporary Art will present "Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI," an exhibition curated by Miller ICA Director Elizabeth Chodos. The exhibition includes national and international artists who work across a wide range of media to explore issues connected to technology and the body. It draws out the tension and porous boundaries between the artificial and corporeal, the digital and physical, the technological and the tactile.

"Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI" includes existing and commissioned work by: Zach Blas, Brian Bress, Nick Cave, Kate Cooper, Stephanie Dinkins, Jes Fan, Claudia Hart, Eunsu Kang, Jillian Mayer, Sarah Oppenheimer and Siebren Versteeg.

This exhibition will be on display Friday, Oct. 5, through Sunday, Feb. 3, with an opening reception from 6-8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 4. There will be a salon discussion connected to the exhibition led by Dana Bishop-Root at the Miller ICA from 6-8 p.m. on Nov. 8. The Miller ICA, and all events associated with this exhibit, are free and open to the public.

"Paradox explores the primacy of the human body as it's poised on the precipice of a potential fusion with artificial intelligence," Chodos said. "Inspired by the Moravec Paradox, the show looks deeper into the unconscious role the body's sensorimotor habitat has in shaping our awareness, imagination, and socio-political structures. Society tends to privilege reason and logic because it is conscious and quantifiable. But beneath this thin "veneer of human thought" is a deeper, more complex knowledge system within the body that is currently responding to and being reshaped by new intelligent technologies."

The exhibit brings focus to 11 national and international artists and dovetails with the coinciding "Carnegie International 2018," bringing critical recognition and national attention to Pittsburgh.

"As technologists imagine the potentials of merging humans with AI, these artists consider the body's elusive and underestimated power, Chodos said. Their various investigations across multiple media offer room to speculate about the exchange between the unconscious and conscious as well as ask questions about what the body knows. Before we enter a generation where cyborgs are as ubiquitous as the internet, in a time when we still inhabit human bodies, the urgent questions to ask are what lessons can our mortal vessels teach us and what unknown paradox might we contain?"

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication featuring curatorial text, photos and artist interviews.
To learn more, visit http://miller-ica.cmu.edu/exhibitions/#48/upcoming-paradox-the-body-in-the-age-of-ai.