Annka Kultys Gallery celebrates its fifth year anniversary with Do Robots Dream of Electric Bees?, a ground-breaking, first commercial gallery exhibition of the work of an artificially intelligent artist. The exhibition builds on the gallery’s historic, world’s-first representation of a robot artist to present recent works by Ai-Da, the bespoke, life-sized, humanoid robot artist. Much broader in aspiration than mere imitation of a human artist, Ai-Da comprises an ethical arts project intended to highlight the beneficial and creative uses of artificial intelligence (AI) within contemporary art, while simultaneously providing a vehicle for exploring the multifaceted challenges facing late-stage capitalism, such as global warming, unprecedented specie extinctions, drug crises and the precariousness of most jobs created by today’s immense flows of liquid global capital and the supranational business practices that accompany them. The project nonetheless manifests itself through the eponymous robot, Ai-Da, described by her creator, Aidan Meller, as the ‘first ultra-realistic robot artist in the world,’ who is also of course a work of art in herself.
