What is Deeep and why
“ […] But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful.”
---Paul Valéry, quoted by Walter Benjamin in the preface to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Deeep is the UK’s first art fair showcasing artificial intelligence as an art form.
In the first two decades of the 21st century, history has not just progressed, but qualitatively changed. We are faced with another paradigmatic moment akin to the arrival of modernity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The last few decades have seen an internet and digital revolution, with entirely new or radically improved technologies proliferating in its wake: the Internet, social media, the blockchain, the accumulation and manipulation of big data, artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning -- to name just a few. Lifestyle, language, daily routine, philosophy, health, politics, even love -- all have irrevocably changed, and look to change further.
Art necessarily has also. Artists, as interpreters of the present back to the culture that exists in that same present, are responding, and the works these artists are producing are of exceptional quality, worth and beauty. Art has taken an AI and digital turn: the art world needs to respond to this also. These artists deserve to be known, admired, collected and studied. AI should not be confined by a sense of its being a complicated science: at its core, AI is an attempt to understand human cognition and intelligence, to understand what it is to be human. The goal is remarkably parallel to that of all the arts. Moreover, the history and inherited forms of art are far from ignored by AI artists, but are being used to investigate and transform them. If AI is interested in human behaviour, so AI art is interested in art as a historical phenomenon through time.
Deeep seeks to be the first of its kind as an AI art fair venture, a leader in this urgent new field of AI art; to support and show faithfully the artists, who want, in turn, to show us what the world has become and what it means.
Bringing together the work of established artists, emerging talent and like-minded galleries, Deeep serves artists and collectors alike. Deeep gives artists in the digital and AI world the space and infrastructure needed to flourish. Deeep helps collectors,—first by codifying the development, history and contemporary of AI art, interpreting a narrative from its undoubtedly multifarious beginnings in the 1950s (and arguably before) to the present with all of its burgeoning potential and future trends,—and second, by selecting and exhibiting the best and most challenging works for collectors.
What to expect at Deeep London 2021
The fair itself comprises a number of events over the duration of 13 - 17 October. These include talks, and such things as AI food, AI cocktails as well as NFT (non-fungible token) drops.
Visitors will find exhibited some of the most important works of the contemporary AI avant-garde. For instance, included among represented artists are Obvious (represented by Lebenson gallery), who have recently achieved the accolade of being the first AI artist to have one of their works, entitled “Edmond de Bellamy” (fig.1) launched into space aboard with Jeff Bezos on the Blue Origins rocket; and Oxia Palus (represented by morf gallery), who have developed AI techniques of rescuing and recreating lost or hidden artworks. Notably, using x-rays that discovered a painted over image on a Modigliani canvas, they brought not just a salvaged vision, but, using AI, a re-imagined complete image of the hidden Modigliani portrait of Beatrice Hastings (fig.2).
Who Deeep is
The founding team of Deeep are:
Stephane Bejean-Lebenson, Eulan To and Erin Lait, who all combine their decades of experience in the contemporary art and creative world to develop this new AI art fair venture. Stephane himself runs the Lebenson gallery, which represents some of the artists exhibiting in the show, and the gallery also resides in Shoreditch.
What the Future of Deeep is
Deeep is also ambitious. Here, in East London, marks the beginning of Deeep as an AI art platform and fair, but, already, we have plans for our second fair in 2022, at the San José Museum of Art in Silicon Valley. We are developing further prospective fairs internationally.