From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
TEFAF, which opens in Maastricht later this month, is a fair where you can wander the aisles blissfully untroubled by questions of artificial intelligence. Yet as the sudden emergence of DeepSeek at the start of 2025 showed, AI is here to stay. Towards the end of February, the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill paused live performances and put up a screen on stage in the main auditorium. Viewers could drop in whenever they liked and watch Yugen (2018), a continuous piece of video art by film director Martha Fiennes, for as long as they liked. Or they could slip into the print room studio and lie on a rug to watch another of her films, Nativity (2011).
Fiennes is perhaps best known for her film Onegin (1999), starring her brother Ralph, that is perhaps closer in spirit to the opera by Tchaikovsky than the poem by Pushkin on which it is based. Fiennes’s taste seems to be for beauty and luscious images rather than irony, which makes these later works even more intriguing.
Each film is composed of video clips that are then assembled by a computer programme to create the version that we see on screen ‘in real time’. Elsewhere the selection of clips is likened to ‘a personal playlist on shuffle’.
In Yugen, extraordinary ‘landscapes’ are created on the screen, within which Salma Hayek appears clad in a red silk dress or a cape of black feathers, brandishing a sword. Vast spaces are defined by biomorphic columns or a continuous splay of fractals. It is not unlike certain scenes from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) on an endless loop.
It seemed interesting to look at these works that give agency in part to a computer programme in the same month that Christie’s held its first sale dedicated solely to AI art – though the title of the auction was ‘Augmented Intelligence’, suggesting some ambiguity about the definition. The end of 2024 saw great leaps in the development and use of artificial intelligence, led largely by OpenAI, which, like the art in Christie’s auction, has been criticised for training its AI models on works made by humans, without the creators’ permission.
Still from the film Yugen (2018), by Martha Fiennes. Courtesy Coronet Theatre
There is no suggestion that Fiennes has done this. ‘The use of AI in my project is fully contained within the artist’s intellectual property,’ she said in a recent interview. But it raises another question: do her two works really use artificial intelligence? They are certainly using computer programming to take over particular functions, in this case editing. But a human being using conventional editing techniques could achieve the same feeling of randomness. What does the new technology add?
Fiennes is not the only artist to explore these ideas – Pierre Huyghe springs to mind, for instance. ‘I personally believe that AI is just a tool to explore and will always reflect the biases that it has been fed,’ Fiennes said in the same interview. But is the art world in danger of misunderstanding what AI actually is?
If makers and collectors see AI as just a tool and galleries and auction houses see AI as a badge that makes them look au courant (and makes art works more valuable), we might be missing its potential to create something genuinely new. A recent show at the Serpentine suggests a new way of thinking about AI. ‘Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst: The Call’ staged an example of how AI can be trained to generate new music using recordings of choral songs. By digging into the specifics of AI collaboration the artists managed to create something new and exciting. Perhaps the question it raises is: who will put the art into artificial intelligence? Artistry of many kinds will be on view in Maastricht, but let us not forget to look out for the artistry of the future too.
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.