Szilvia Mondel
UPCOMING news and events
Last updated: Septemebr 23, 2019
NEWS
Upcoming exhibition: I'm happy to announce that I'm recently invited by Prof. Peter M.A. Sloot, Scientific Director of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), University of Amsterdam to show my work at the institution. The exhibition will be opened in December 2019. I'm cordially invitedto give a lecture the after installation. Details about exhibition and the lecture will follow soon.
https://ias.uva.nl/
WORK IN PROGRESS
Working title: 9/11
Honestly I don’t like to give suggestive titles to paintings, as my paintings are quite abstract. Before anyone would blame me for the manipulation of thought, I would like to tell that giving a working title is the way of working progress. It is simply how I used to work.
I like to give a working title to my work at the moment when the picture on the canvas arises. It is intuitional and serves to give direction to further steps in the development of the painting.
9/11 is the tragedy something that we can’t forget. The images were burned in our eyes, brain and memory forever. Nevertheless, it was a world-shaking event that changed life and history. Perhaps it one of the main landmarks of the recent years, that ushering change in history.
Working title: Chinese New Year
Begin 2019 I was visiting Singapore, and the island of Penang and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. It happened during the Chinese New Year. The 15 days celebration gave me an impressive introduction to the Chinese religion, culture and it's rootedness in Asia.
During the New Year festivities, red lanterns across the streets, put up exorbitant red displays and set off firecrackers to light the sky and scare away loudly the bad spirits. Chinatowns all over the world hosts various events and performances including the Lion Dance, street bazaars, acrobatic carnival shows, and nightly parties and shows. The 15 day celebration drawn family members together. I have never seen this massive celebration, the vibrant life and multicultural melting pot that connects so many people. The economical cross-continental business, the crowds in overpopulated cities, modern life and how it’s all connected to thousands of years traditions, culture and religion is blinding for the eye and paralysing for something that we call it in Europe 'being an individual'.
In this painting want to visualise this experience.
Working title: City landscape
Industrialization has historically led to economic growth, rapid expansion of cities and massive urbanization from the late 19th century. Contemporary cities are arguably abstractions of ephemeral, unreal, unmappable and the feeling of uncanny. The metropolis as a zone of uncanny, a setting that is decentred, fragmented and defined by the otherness and the immense loneliness, encountered by the crowd.
Working title:
Artifical Intelligency and the love of Edmond De Belamy
"Undoubtedly, the A.I. painting looks like art. Not good art, I would argue, but since it fits into the convention of three-quarter view portraiture, is contained within a gilded frame, and is hung on a wall in an environment where we expect art to be displayed and sold, it looks like the real deal. But is it?"
https://medium.com/s/story/ai-portrait-sells-for-432-000-but-is-it-really-art-4bd664a62fe6
I'm fascinated of the new utopian thinking about AI and there are many contradictionary reasons why. The many discussion on social forums are inspiring as fascinating to work with and translate is into new painterly images.
"Recent years have seen a more portentous and ambiguous meaning emerge, with the word “algorithm” taken to mean any large, complex decision-making software system; any means of taking an array of input – of data – and assessing it quickly, according to a given set of criteria (or “rules”). This has revolutionized areas of medicine, science, transport, communication, making it easy to understand the utopian view of computing that held sway for many years. Algorithms have made our lives better in myriad ways.
We might call these algorithms “dumb”, in the sense that they’re doing their jobs according to parameters defined by humans. The quality of result depends on the thought and skill with which they were programmed. At the other end of the spectrum is the more or less distant dream of human-like artificial general intelligence, or AGI. A properly intelligent machine would be able to question the quality of its own calculations, based on something like our own intuition (which we might think of as a broad accumulation of experience and knowledge). To put this into perspective, Google’s DeepMind division has been justly lauded for creating a program capable of mastering arcade games, starting with nothing more than an instruction to aim for the highest possible score. This technique is called “reinforcement learning” and works because a computer can play millions of games quickly in order to learn what generates points. Some call this form of ability “artificial narrow intelligence”, but here the word “intelligent” is being used much as Facebook uses “friend” – to imply something safer and better understood than it is. Why? Because the machine has no context for what it’s doing and can’t do anything else. Neither, crucially, can it transfer knowledge from one game to the next (so-called “transfer learning”), which makes it less generally intelligent than a toddler, or even a cuttlefish. We might as well call an oil derrick or an aphid “intelligent”. Computers are already vastly superior to us at certain specialized tasks, but the day they rival our general ability is probably some way off – if it ever happens. Human beings may not be best at much, but we’re second-best at an impressive range of things."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/29/coding-algorithms-frankenalgos-program-danger
