The Aiex Playground is an ongoing artwork by the Norwegian artist Trygve Skogrand.
The artwork is an instagram account and a process.
We are surrounded by algorithms. Some subtly steer our lives, by suggesting what music to listen to, what tv-shows to watch. Others tell us what books to read, what news to believe. For an artist, being visible on social media is very important. To accomplish that, feeding the algorithms with videos, hashtags, text, images and a large work in "engangement" with other profiles is suddenly part of an artist's work. The "Aiex Playground" lets the algorithm play with themself instead.
The profile photo on the site, the profile text and the name of the "artist" is created by algorithms, based on input from the artist about what the account is.
Then the process: One algorithm creates random words. A second creates a picture based on these words. A third algorithm creates a text and hashtags based on these words. And the Instagram algorithm encompasses the result.
An algorithm created the profile photo based on input from the artist: "an interesting profile photo for an artist experimenting with digital tools and image algorithms».
Another algorithm suggested the name "Quinn Reynolds" for this algorithmic artist: «a gender neutral name for an artist that works with image generating algorithms»:
The descriptive text and hashtags are created by a Large Language Model algorithm from the same random words as the image.
As the site is filled, other algorithms running on other instagram accounts observes the Aiex site, and posts algorithmically created comments and likes. These becomes part of the artwork.
The process is in it self absurd, fitting with the implicit absurdity of the algorithmically created images and the texts, as here: "Happy anniversary to the planet economist!"
Throughout the project, the artist "invites" different algorithms to be "artist in residence" at the Aiex Playground. Each algorithm has it's own style, as seen here from top to bottom with three images each: Playform, Dalle-2 and Midjourney.
