Vasulka Live Archive / Interfaces

The exhibition project Vasulka Live Archive / Interfaces is a triptych in nature, consisting of - large-format video mapping, which brought the content of the archive into the public space and added a performative aspect to it; fully immersive virtual reality provides an individual experience of immersion in the content of the archive directly in the gallery; and an online accessible, uniquely equipped website offers different perspectives on the work of artificial neural networks in the iconographic analysis of the Vasulka's videos. The chosen exhibition format is dispersive and asynchronous in terms of both the formats of the individual exhibitions and their reception. The Vasulka Live Archive / Interfaces exhibition is a temporary and unique opportunity to present them in relation to each other and in a wider context. Visitors will be introduced to the Vasulka's work in a gallery transformed into a laboratory dedicated to an emerging discipline - the iconography of the age of artificial intelligence. At the heart of the Vasulka Live Archive project is experimentation with the use of artificial intelligence in art historical research. It focuses not only on the use of the functionalities of intelligent software (image recognition technologies) for iconographic research on Vasulka's work, but also explores various possibilities of visualizing the results of AI work. During the exhibition, other outputs that allow to observe the hidden (pseudo) cognitive functions of artificial intelligence, likened to dreaming, will be presented, which were created using the Lucid library and the DeepDream tool (Mordvinstev et al. 2015). The exhibition is not a showcase of new paintings or remakes of Vasulka's work. The exhibition will present new types of interfaces to the contents of the Vasulka archive. These are epistemological tools, belonging to a family of new cultural forms that provide "new ways of accessing and manipulating information. Their techniques include hypermedia, databases, search engines, data mining, image processing, visualization, and simulation" (Manovich 2003).

An integral part of the exhibition is a series of lectures by the author team, in which the different phases and described aspects of this interdisciplinary project will be presented in turn.

Authors

• Curators: Jana Horáková, Jiří Mucha
• Post-production of audiovisual materials: Jiří Mucha
• Artificial intelligence and visualization program: Pavel Sikora, Štěpán Miklánek (using Lucid and TensorFlow library)
• Web design: Dušan Barok
• Virtual reality: Chamit Abdulvaliyev

The exhibition is part of the project Media Art Live Archive: Intelligent Interface for Interactive Mediation of Cultural Heritage (No. TL02000270) co-financed with state support from the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic under the ÉTA programme.