MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE: ART MEETS AI Hans Ulrich Obrist Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the author of Ways of Curating and Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects. In the Introduction to the second edition of his book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan noted the ability of art to “anticipate future social and technological developments.” Art is “an early alarm system,” pointing us to new developments in times ahead and allowing us “to prepare to cope with them... . Art as a radar environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training... .” In 1964, when McLuhan’s book was first published, the artist Nam June Paik was just building his Robot K-456 to experiment with the technologies that subsequently would start to influence society. He had worked with television earlier, challenging its usual passive consumption by the viewer, and later made art with global live-satellite broadcasts, using the new media less for entertainment than to point us to their poetic and intercultural capacities (which are still mostly unused today). The Paiks of our time, of course, are now working with the Internet, digital images, and artificial intelligence. Their works and thoughts, again, are an early alarm system for the developments ahead of us. As a curator, my daily work is to bring together different works of art and connect different cultures. Since the early 1990s, I have also been organizing conversations and meetings with practitioners from different disciplines, in order to go beyond the general reluctance to pool knowledge. Since I was interested in hearing what artists have to say about artificial intelligence, I recently organized several conversations between artists and engineers. The reason to look closely at AI is that two of the most important questions of today are “How capable will AI become?” and “What dangers may arise from it?” Its early applications already influence our everyday l