The Wrong Biennale arrives to Costa Rica with 23 artists of 12 nationalities that mix visual art with artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is a controversial topic worldwide and many issues arise from it. The visual arts and contemporary art have not lagged behind and have rather addressed this debate.

In this area, ethical questions have been raised about the use of artists’ images to feed neural networks without their consent. Discussions have also touched on how to rethink the idea of originality and creativity in a world mediatized by the generation of images using these digital media.

Digital Exhibition

Costa Rican curator Alfredo Arévalo Rodríguez wants to bring these discussions to Costa Rica through his participation in the sixth edition of the Wrong Biennale.

It is a multicultural and decentralized international biennal. A global reference in the art scene and has received multiple international awards such as the SOIS Culture 2019 and the honorable mention of the European Commission S+T+ARTS, 2020 award. In their own words:

The Wrong is a melting pot of cultures, styles and mediums for established, emerging and underrepresented artists to explore creativity and digital culture in a positive and constructive way, in order to foster a more inclusive and diverse digital art scene and encourage artistic growth and experimentation.

The curator, Alfredo Arévalo is a student of the master’s degree in philosophy of culture: “digital technology and contemporary culture” at Moscow State University. He has already co-curated two exhibitions in Moscow in 2021 and 2022, one of which included a delegation of Costa Rican artists. He also curated an international exhibition in Mexico City in 2023 that also took place in Florence and Moscow.

Wrong Biennale in Costa Rica

The exhibition, which will premiere on February 9, will take place at the F de Imagen gallery, located in Barrio Amón. It will be part of the Wrong Biennale.

In this case, Arévalo proposes to a group of 21 artists of 12 nationalities (Costa Rica, Mongolia, China, South Korea, Russia, Kazakhstan, Peru, Mexico, Lithuania, Italy, Great Britain and Germany) a visual experiment with artificial intelligence. The experiment seeks strategies to “rewire” neural networks and enable their use to expand the artists’ creative means.

The exploration consisted in the use of the artificial intelligence tool of exactly.ai, whose results can be interpreted as authentic works of a digital alchemy, which rethink the interaction of post-internet art with new technologies and its most recent aesthetic quests.

Exactly.ai

Exactly is an advanced generative Artificial Intelligence platform that uses machine learning to allow artists to be able to create their own artificial intelligence model by feeding the AI with just 10 images of their own work. This facilitates the process of playing with new ideas or applying the artists’ style to many different subjects and contexts.

In addition, Exactly is a tool committed to artists and assures them that their images will not be used without their consent.

The exhibition will end in mid-March and viewers can expect a heterogeneous and innovative exhibition. Both for the themes it touches, for the visual media it explores, and for an innovative assembly approach, in which F de imagen played an important role.

F de Imagen is a space that presents itself as a point for reflection, experimentation, creation and exhibition, in a world dominated by the image and in constant technological transformation, and a gallery that has been gaining an important place in the Costa Rican art scene with very interesting and innovative exhibitions.

This will be a unique and unusual experience for the Costa Rican contemporary art scene.

Sensorial Sunsets and Digital Alchemy