What Counts as Intelligence? A Review of Ho Rui An's "The Shape of History / The Standpoint of Intelligence" (Text by Kwon Sang-hae)
A review of Ho Rui An's lecture performance exploring the future of intelligence and ethics in the age of generative AI.Summary
Singaporean artist Ho Rui An's lecture performance "The Shape of History / The Standpoint of Intelligence" (premiered 2024) was staged at "KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2026." The work begins with Ho's 2016 experience at the Google Cultural Institute, where he witnessed a face-matching app linking a figure in Chua Mia Tee's painting "Epic Poem of Malaya" (1955) to a different portrait photograph. Starting from the question of whether AI that matches and classifies images grasps the historical meaning of the depicted figures, the piece reexamines from the history of intelligence what it means for generative AI to learn from past materials and produce new images. On stage, Ho sits at the center, with two screens on either side: the left displays related footage and documents, while the right shows, in the first half, real-time text transcription of Ho's speech, and in the second half, AI-generated images based on words Ho inputs. Kwon Sang-hae, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, reviews this work exploring the future of intelligence and ethics.
(Source：Tokyo Art Beat)