‘There’s no such thing as a neutral algorithm’: the existential AI exhibition confronting Sydney

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Text Stream II, as part of exhibition Atmospheric Memory on at the Powerhouse museum, Sydney. Photograph: Zan Wimberley

When Y2K seemed like the world’s most pressing technological concern, the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was using a dictionary and a set of grammatical rules to teach a computer how to write questions. The program he built can make enquiries in Spanish, English, German and French, in 4.7tn possible combinations. When the artwork showed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last year, it still had 271,000 years of new questions to ask.

Which is to say, Lozano-Hemmer has been working with generative technology long enough to have learned a powerful lesson: “There is no such thing as a neutral algorithm.”