Uncanny Valley at de Young Museum Explores AI and Humanity

The de Young Museum in San Francisco has opened 'Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI', a group exhibition running until October 25, 2020. Curated with thirteen international artists, the show shifts focus from AI's expressive possibilities to its redefinition of humanity in an algorithm-driven world. Located near Silicon Valley, the museum uses art to examine the changing relationship between humans and machines, and between the natural and artificial. Highlights include Ian Cheng's 'BOB (Bag of Beliefs)', a mutating digital snake also featured at the Venice Biennale by Ralph Rugoff; Agnieska Kurant's crowdsourcing and digital labor research; Simon Denny and The Zairja Collective's works on the ecological and humanitarian costs of IT; Forensic Architecture's machine learning algorithms to detect objects related to human rights violations; Trevor Paglen, fresh from his Fondazione Prada project with Kate Crawford; and Hito Steyerl's 'The City of Broken Windows', previously at Castello di Rivoli in 2018, addressing AI's impact on social injustice and economic disparity.