For an interactive participation, visitors may be thrilled to experience German-American artist Diemut Strebe‘s Three Approaches to Synthetic Entities (2025) and El Turco/Living Theater (2024). The former demonstrates a dialogue between AI and humans, while the latter involves AI machines debating with each other. The avatars identify with fictional and historical personalities and captivate us about their impressive knowledge and intelligence, yet manipulated by a kind of “magic trick.” One of the avatars is actually operated directly in real-time by a human hidden in the system. The other avatar is controlled by a GPT4 machine.

Diemut Strebe, El Turco (montage), 2024, Coding and programming: E. Barzilay and team (Northeastern University), B. Greenman (University of Utah), H. Shi and SHI Lab (Georgia Institute of Technology)

The exhibit ends with a huge, spellbinding installation exceeding 24 meters long. Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, Since 1500 (2023) by Australian AI researcher Kate Crawford and Serbian technology researcher Vladan Joler has devised a mapping trajectory that speculates the evolution of technical and social structures over five centuries. Filled with incredible details, it tracks the contemporary period by the history of ideas, infrastructure, power systems and patterns of colonialism. The vertical axis indicates time, while the horizontal axis points to algorithms, architecture and borders.

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power,Since 1500, 2023, Installation view: Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power,1500–2025, Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2023-2024, Photo: Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio, Photo courtesy: Fondazione Prada

Leaving the exhibit carries both an enigmatic and unsettling feeling on how mechanical and machine-dictated our lives have become. “What does it mean to be human? “ and “What is consciousness and reality?” are a few rhetorical questions we have yet to fully answer. 

MACHINE LOVE: Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art
Date: February 13th – June 8th, 2025
Opening Hours: 10:00 – 22:00 (March 20th and Tuesdays except April 29th and May 6th　till 17:00)
Place: Mori Art Museum
Address: 53F, Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, 6-10-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo
Tel: +81 (0)47 316 2772 (Hello Dial)
https://www.mori.art.museum