AI and Gunpowder

Cai Guo-Qiang, WE ARE, 2024. Photo: Kenryou Gu

One criticism of "PST ART: Art & Science Collide" is the relatively modest attention given artificial intelligence, one of the more pressing scientific topics for artists and everyone else. An artist who uses AI in a significant way is Cai Guo-Qiang, otherwise known as the maven of gunpowder and fireworks. The USC Pacific Asia Museum's "Cai Guo-Qiang: A Material Odyssey" is among the last PST ART shows to be running (through through June 15, 2025). It's a retrospective filling the entire museum. The ornate room normally displaying Himalayan art is now devoted to works created using AI. The grouping isn't the best art in the show. Cai is experimenting, as we all are. But the AI pieces, which also entail pyrotechnics, bear of issues of artistic (ethical) agency. Who controls the uncontrollable?

Starting in 2017, Cai and collaborators began creating cAI, a generative model based on Cai's own art and writings. This is used to direct the creation new gunpowder drawings—either by Cai or a robotic arm—that are ignited, creating the work in an explosive detonation.

cAI [Cai Guo-Qiang], Painting a Wedding Portrait for Cai's Grandparents, 2024

The piece with the most colorful backstory is Painting a Wedding Portrait for Cai's Grandparents. Photography was expensive in rural China, and Cai's grandmother regretted that she didn't have a portrait from her wedding day. She hoped that her artist grandson would one day paint a wedding portrait of her and her husband, who had died young. Cai found a youthful photo of his grandfather and a much older one of his grandmother. Using age regression software, he created a deepfake of the couple's appearance on their wedding day. A robot arm drew the digital image in gunpowder on canvas, and it was detonated to create the portrait.

cAI [Cai Guo-Qiang], The Annunciation of cAI, 2024

AI has often been sold with warm-and-fuzzy for-instances. But as with pyrotechnics, it's the nature of AI to move fast and break things. Last September, Cai helped launch the PST ART with WE ARE, a display of daytime fireworks and drones in the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. Cai supplied live commentary: "Today, I want to call AI out, telling it not to keep hiding inside the computer! Bro, come out!" The ensuing display was sublime in the full Burkean sense. Falling debris injured several spectators, and the detonations were loud enough to alarm an edgy urban populace. As we contemplate an AI singularity, the parallels between black powder and black-box AI seem especially pertinent. 

Cai Guo-Qiang, WE ARE, 2024. Photo: Kenryou Gu