Newtown Square artist Michele Gallagher and gallery director Michele Colonna discuss the finer points of an AI-generated digital print at the January 16 opening of “Syntax of Sorrow.”
Tucked away on historic Louella Court in Wayne, one of the Main Line’s most futuristic merchants, Colonna Contemporary, is doing its usual visionary thing: getting us to use our eyes to expand our brains.
Last Friday night, a small stream of art enthusiasts and curious neighbors dropped in to view Colonna’s latest mind-bender.
Gallery owner Michele (Mih-KALE-ay) Colonna had put out a curatorial call to artists around the world: We know AI chatbots are trained in human experience but does that mean they can actually feel things? And can AI generated-art actually generate emotions like sorrow and grief?
Each of the show’s seven artists used AI to create their digital – and in one case, sculptural – answers.
Blowing minds even more: Each piece inspired an AI-generated poem, framed and hanging beside it, in effect translating the visual into the verbal.
And then there’s the AI-fueled iPad station. Visitors are prompted to type in a specific personal “loss,” which AI turns into a playable clip. At this visual altar to mankind and machine, Word becomes not flesh, but sound.
“This is one of the first exhibitions on the Main Line to treat AI not as a gimmick but as a serious medium entering art history,” Colonna tells us. “It’s rare to see it framed this way outside of New York or LA.”
Colonna likes to throw out words like blockchain and NFTs – inside baseball stuff for art collectors in the digital age – but he also speaks, Cassandra-like, about our brave new AI world.
“As we approach Singularity, which is when man makes way for machines, when machines take over, will those machines inherit man’s afflictions?”
He calls the current exhibition “really important because we’re going on record with something that’s highly speculative.”
One thing that’s NOT highly speculative: purchasing art at Colonna Contemporary.
“We’re the first gallery in the world to offer a certificate of authenticity that’s registered on the blockchain,” Colonna boasts.
A paper certificate can burn in a house fire and provenance is lost. “But once authenticity is recorded on the blockchain, it’s irrefutable. You can’t change it; it’s there forever.”
Will this probing, prescient jewel box of a gallery also stick around Wayne forever – or at least for a good long while? Sure hope so.
“Syntax of Sorrow” is on display at Colonna Contemporary, 4 Louella Court, Wayne, through Feb. 10.
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