Mori Art Museum’s Machine Love Exhibition Blends Video Games, AI, and Contemporary Art

The exhibition “Machine Love: Video Games, AI, and Contemporary Art” will be held at the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi, Tokyo, starting February 13, 2025.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), our daily lives are constantly evolving. Looking back, technology and art have always run parallel in the history of computer art, video art, and more. While the recent developments in video games and AI bring entirely new possibilities to artists’ creative activities, the emergence of generative AI poses a threat to human creativity, drawing significant attention within the context of contemporary art.

This exhibition will showcase contemporary art that employs technologies such as game engines, AI, virtual reality (VR), and generative AI, which has the potential to surpass human creativity. Visitors can expect to see entirely new aesthetics and image-making techniques derived from various data in digital spaces. The exhibition will also explore themes of liberation from societal identities related to gender and race through avatars and characters, as well as the visualization of surreal landscapes. However, despite the incorporation of these new expressive methods, the exhibition delves into universal issues such as existentialism, life and death, ethics, environmental challenges in the modern world, historical interpretation, and diversity.

The participating artists include Beeple, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Diemut, Asako Fujikura, Hsu Jaw Wei, Kim Ayoung, Lu Yang, Ryotaro Sato, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Adrián Villar Rojas, and Anicka Yi, comprising a total of 12 artists.

The exhibition features works and immersive spaces where “machines” (a term that refers to computers and hardware rather than the traditional image of heavy industrial machinery) collaborate with artists, creating experiences that stir our emotions, such as love, empathy, exhilaration, fear, and anxiety. Furthermore, as the exhibition intertwines reality and virtual spaces, it serves as a platform to reflect on the relationship between humanity and technology, providing an opportunity to envision together how to navigate an uncertain future more effectively.

At the venue, there will be an indie game corner curated by media artist Akihiko Taniguchi, who serves as an exhibition advisor. Visitors will be able to play games selected by Taniguchi that explore the theme of the relationship between “myself and others.”