A History of A.I. in Art, From Ancient Inca Data Systems to the New Battlefield of Algorithmic Bias
We identified some of the earliest developments and key movements in the field today.
While the fiction of A.I. art is pretty neat, the messy reality is that artists who work with computational systems have much more say in the outcomes than the term might suggest: they provide the inputs, guide the process, and filter the outputs.
Antecedent Technologies
A.I. didn’t spring forth from nothing in the 21st century. Here are its earliest seeds.
3000 B.C. – Talking Knots
The ancient Inca used a system called Quipu—”talking knots”—to collect data and keep records on everything from census information to military organization. The practice, in use centuries before algebra was born, was both aesthetically intricate and internally logically robust enough that it could be seen as a precursor to computer programming languages.
See the full story here: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artificial-intelligence-art-history-2045520
