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Eyeo 2016 – Kyle McDonald from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

Kyle McDonald is a media artist who’s based in Brooklyn, New York. Kyle attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for AI and started a career in Philosophy/Computer Science. Kyle’s work has a lot to do with experimentation with visuals and how it affects the world. As a video artist, this resonates with me. Among my favorite works of art are Kyle’s “Exhausting a Crowd” and, more recently, “pplkpr”. Both deal with creating new visual statements and helping others develop different perspectives from these statements.

Something Kyle said that really stuck with me was, “If Ella Fitzgerald never sang a single song, and a bot synthesized her tomorrow, would it feel the same?…I think it might and that’s kind of scary.” Although this is a response to a question he gave himself, it still holds a lot of weight. It shows his internal struggle to aid in the advancement of AI at the expense of losing the humanity (basis of art). As artists living in an era of technology, I think we all should ask similar questions to ourselves in order to determine whether we’re guiding the tech for our artistic purposes, or if the tech is guiding us.

Kyle McDonald Website – kylemcdonald.net

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