Imperfection is often a conscious part of painting – errare humanum est. A mistake is not just a deviation, but part of the human hand and of making itself, something that comes with thinking and doing. A machine, on the other hand, does not make mistakes in the same way, because it has no understanding of how an error can be both natural and meaningful.
200 years ago, when photography was born, people felt exactly the same kind of skepticism and unease that surrounds the rise of artificial intelligence today. The new technology promised something unprecedented—an image without the hand, a picture without the brush. Yet what once appeared to the public as a marvel and to artists as a threat to their livelihood gradually became a natural part of our world. And yet, this time feels different.
It is hard to imagine an artist whose work has not been shaped in some way by photography, as much of what we see every day reaches us through the camera lens. As then, there are those who approach these changes with caution, but also those driven by curiosity, and those who see artificial intelligence as a tool that might open up new possibilities. It is this last perspective that the five Estonian artists in this exhibition explore: Vano Allsalu, Gerda Hansen, Siiri Jüris, Carl-Robert Kagge, and Mart Vainre.
Imperfection is often a conscious part of painting – errare humanum est. A mistake is not just a deviation, but part of the human hand and of making itself, something that comes with thinking and doing. A machine, on the other hand, does not make mistakes in the same way, because it has no understanding of how an error can be both natural and meaningful.
It is worth considering that we treat images made by artificial intelligence with caution, even though our own minds work in a similar way. The human brain holds a kind of image bank – an archive of memories, impressions, and dreamlike combinations from which new connections and images emerge. We dream of situations that never happened, yet every detail comes from somewhere: our childhood, a film, a conversation, a book. We, too, constantly generate new images and worlds, drawing on what we have seen, heard, or experienced. The question is not so much whether a machine can create like a human, but how we create ourselves, and where our ideas really come from.
Allsalu, Vainre, Hansen, Jüris, and Kagge do not use artificial intelligence to produce a perfect image or to conceal their use of AI, but to push its limits. For some, it is a tool – a way to visualize ideas more quickly or to test different possibilities. For others, it becomes a kind of partner, bringing unexpected results that a single human mind might not come up with on its own.
Human error is often accidental, while a machine operates within given limits. In these artists’ works, however, machine error does not feel threatening, but rather freeing. Here, mistakes become a way of working and a starting point, not something to hide or remove. The result is a form of painting that is aware of its time, where the surface of the work brings together the human hand and the computer processor, the brushstroke and the pixel.
Curator Stella Mõttus
This exhibition is kindly supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
