Urban Al Art

When the visual artist Jussi Lahtinen saw Fritz Lang's silent film classic Metropolis, he became interested in creating fictional cityscapes. He created images of real architectural fragments in places such as Tampere, Helsinki and East Berlin and combined them in dystopian collages. In his current work, entitled Urban AI Art, Lahtinen feeds artificial intelligence with the image material from his Metropolis series and allows the art computer to constantly generate new collages in an endless series. The Urban AI artwork leads a life of its own without a story, which means that the audience can only see the same image once for a short time. The images of the artwork are deleted as soon as they appear. Like a perpetuum mobile, the art machine produces a stream of images in real time, here and now. At Nordischer Klang, Lahtinen presents his artwork via digital steles, raising questions about originality, seriality and the role of artists in the age of digital producibility.