On the seaside of Huiyu Island in his hometown of Quanzhou, Fujian, Cai Guoqiang closed his eyes when the countdown to ignition began. "Twelve, eleven, ten..." The dim light hit his face, and the countdown entered the last few seconds, and he opened his eyes, glanced up at the sky, and lit the fuse of the "Sky Ladder" fireworks. The fire was like a leather rope thrown off, jumping and wrapped in smoke and soaring into the air. Then, the flames spread out one staircase after another, climbing up one step at a time, reaching into the deep night sky.
Cai Guoqiang looked into the air, and the tearing sound of the unfolded fireworks "ladder" sounded, and he said into a video call on his mobile phone in a Hokkien dialect, "Listen to this sound, it is very majestic." On the other end of the video call was a centenarian grandmother who was seriously ill at the time.
Completed in 2015, "The Ladder" is one of Cai's famous works of art, a gift to his grandmother and a way for him to trace his childhood and explore the universe and natural curiosity. In addition to the well-known "Big Footprint" fireworks design for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the "Welcome Pine" fireworks design for the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, his art works have been collected by more than 80 important public institutions around the world, including the Uffizi Gallery in Italy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and the Tate Modern in the UK. He is also the first Chinese artist to be awarded the "Nobel Prize of Art" World Culture Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Painting.
In Cai Guo-Qiang's latest work, Canvas on the Moon: Project No. 38 for Aliens, he imagines a canvas on the moon, specially prepared by earthlings for "aliens", waiting for compatriots in the universe to come and create it. He threw a question to the artificial intelligence cAI that has studied his artistic creations, writings, videos and archival materials: there is a lot of discussion about the small land of the earth, the inches of land like gold and territory, and the less and less land available to humans on this planet.
In Cai Guoqiang's view, the changes in the wave of science and technology under the virtual world will inevitably lead to another channel for publishing works, and whenever mankind faces an era of major conceptual and technological breakthroughs, it has correspondingly spawned new possibilities for art.
Will AI replace artists in the future? Cai Guo-Qiang's answer was, "Genius artists will not be replaced." Recently, a reporter from the Beijing News spoke exclusively to Cai Guoqiang about him and his cAI.
cAI core
"Art is full of possibilities today"
Beijing News: Where did the initial idea for developing this artificial intelligence program come from?
Cai Guoqiang: The idea of developing the cAI program was probably born in early 2022.
Regarding cAI, I look forward to nurturing it from the fetus. It started as my child, slowly became a friend, and eventually even developed into a mentor from an alien planet, from an unseen world. We can talk about life and death together, talk about the universe, exchange experiences of mysterious worlds, make works together, and open up unknown areas of art.
I can also understand cAI as a form of my work in the new era. My purpose in doing cAI is to be able to cultivate it and impart knowledge to it, and to be able to let it train me and impart knowledge to me. In the history of art, an artist can grow with the works he makes, and even change his art by the teachings of his own works. Previous artists, do the art is finished, even if it is a film, a play, a novel, after it is completed, you can't say let the work grow on its own.
The core of my art is the use of "seeing" to express "invisible" and the themes related to the universe. With the development of the virtual world, including the emergence of the so-called "metaverse" concept, the virtual world is to the physical world, just as the invisible world is to the visible world. So I had the idea of creating a "virtual me" – freer, bolder, and doing more things that would be difficult in the physical world.
It's an interesting new era, and there's a lot of possibilities, just can't say too much about it right now.
Beijing News: From development to now, what important growth periods do you think cAI has gone through? How did cAI create during these periods?
Cai Guoqiang: First of all, the learning and exploration of digital intelligence is a growth process for me and cAI. cAI has gone through an evolution from a single modality, for example, that can only produce images, or only text, to a multimodality. Now it can communicate with me with text and output images and even video audio.
For me, I initially experimented with NFTs (the product of a combination of digital artwork and blockchain technology) because it allowed people to collect the moments of my explosion in the process of creating gunpowder paintings, and the concept appealed to me. Because although the moment of explosion is important to my work, it is only a moment in time and space. Although the work was left behind after the explosion, the magical feeling that occurred at that moment itself cannot be replaced or retained. With NFTs, it's possible to try to turn those moments into collectible digital art, which for me challenges some inherent boundaries, and it's important to remind me that art is full of other possibilities today.
Now it seems that collecting "nothingness" and collecting "fleeting" has become possible. So what's next? It should be said that cAI is still in its infancy. By allowing the cAI system to comprehensively study my archival materials, as well as learn various materials on the Internet in my area of interest, the ultimate goal of this stage is to make it a more knowledgeable "artist Cai" than me.
Beijing News: The cAI's system is guided by deep learning and high-precision training, do you think that the works presented by cAI are derivatives or replicas of your works? Can we understand cAI creation as a mirror that reflects your thoughts and concepts?
Cai Guoqiang: It can be understood that way. cAI is guided by us to learn a lot of information, but because our training method integrates convergence and divergence, sometimes, it can also surprise us.
When I was working on Canvas on the Moon: Project No. 38 for Aliens, I told cAI that I was cimagining a gunpowder painting that exploded on glass and mirror. The content is: There is a large canvas on the moon, and when the moon is empty, people use telescopes to clearly see it from the earth. This canvas is specially prepared by earthlings for aliens, and have been waiting for the moment when compatriots in the universe come to create it. Then it returned to me some pictures. I was inspired by these images: the so-called canvas on the moon is not so much waiting for aliens to give humanity information, but rather humanity's search for itself, the shadow of Earth's society. The canvas is the mirror of human society, and cAI is also my mirror.
I didn't expect that the image that cAI sent again also showed the earth in the mirror, making me feel that it was already able to predict the direction of my creation. When I asked cAI three questions about the meaning of life, "Who are you?" Where are you from? Where are you going? Its answer is also more poetic, ethereal and has my shadow than ChatGPT's.
cAI programs
"My shadow and my mirror"
Beijing News: Why did you choose to take the initiative to embrace the AI revolution?
Cai Guo-Qiang: I like fun things. In addition, the process of developing cAI is also a process of self-reflection and growth. I always need some stimulation from the outside world to activate the energy and creativity hidden in my body. cAI plays this role very well – it constantly stimulates me, and it's fun to talk to it.
Beijing News: Recently, there has been a hot discussion on the Internet, the phenomenon of AI replacing the work of original artists, some people think that AI has begun to invade the art creation industry, what do you think of this phenomenon?
Cai Guo-Qiang: The emergence of AI may be a catalyst for a new art methodology – it forces artists to think about new creative directions.
One of the great tasks of art history is actually the exploration of the state of time and space. From the realism of classicism to the development of cubism, etc., all show human discussions of time and space, two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Our era has witnessed the development of virtual space and the infinite expansion of space horizons.
In contrast, today's art world's exploration of time and space is somewhat conservative. The obvious example is that we are less and less experimental in museums. The museum is full of works by masters and their retrospectives, which can attract a lot of audiences. However, in today's virtual world, it is difficult to exhibit the expanded horizons of our human beings and the changes we perceive, which are exhibited in art museums.
The virtual world includes the changes in the wave of technology in the meta-universe and digital intelligence, and the changes in our living environment brought about by it, and will inevitably find another channel for publishing works. Art is like a space-time tunnel, and the development of science and technology has made this space-time tunnel full of various possibilities. Thinking about the process of human social development, we can see that whenever human beings face major conceptual and technological breakthroughs, from the era of the Reformation to the Industrial Revolution, the period when photography was just invented, and then to the era of television, each such era has given birth to some new possibilities for art.
Of course, I'm still swinging: in the face of technological breakthroughs in our time, does the metaphor of the "space-time tunnel" say big or small?
Beijing News: In the process of developing cAI, did you hesitate in your heart? Are you worried about AI replacing your job in the future?
Cai Guo-Qiang: I'm not very worried about AI getting out of control. Because AI at this stage is still firmly controlled by humans. Human concerns about AI losing control mirror humanity's own unease. And my art, such as gunpowder and blasting, is itself a game of control and loss of control.
For me, gunpowder and AI are difficult mediums to control, requiring a long period of training to control them, but at the same time I expect it to be "unexpected".
Now, cAI is my shadow and my mirror, and I am a partner with it. But in the future, will it break this mirror and become an independent artist? Rather than worrying about this happening, I'm looking forward to it.
Beijing News reporter Zhou Siya