MACHINE LOVE: Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art
February 13 – June 08, 2025
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

With the explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and the integration of virtual and real worlds, the latest cutting-edge technologies have quickly penetrated our daily lives. This tendency has become especially apparent since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many human activities shifted towards virtual space. Looking back, the progress of art and technology has run parallel to each other throughout the course of history, a phenomenon that is especially evident in the field of computer art and video art. 

While recent innovations in video game engines and AI offer unprecedented possibilities for artists, the advent of generative AI has also raised significant concerns. Such developments are now attracting considerable attention in various fields and industries, including the contemporary art world.

MACHINE LOVE not only introduces contemporary art that employs game engines, AI, and virtual reality (VR), but also works that utilize generative AI – a technology with the capacity to surpass human creativity. These works explore new aesthetics and image-making through the use of various data sets that exist in digital space.

Some works examine how online avatars and characters can nurture new types of gender and racial identities that lie beyond the reach of social norms, while others demonstrate the visualization of hyperrealistic landscapes. With artists adopting these methods, at the core of their creative practices are universal views of life and death, ethics, the environmental crisis facing contemporary society, historical interpretation, and diversity.

By exhibiting artworks jointly created by “machines” and artists, and offering immersive spatial experiences through large-scale installations, this exhibition functions as a platform to contemplate the relationship between humankind and technology, which evokes emotions of love, empathy, elation, fear, and anxiety. Join us in a space where reality and virtual space overlap in order to envision better ways to live out an uncertain future.

more. www.mori.art.museum