【Article by IAIC】

More than a century ago, Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal, turned it 90 degrees and placed it in an exhibition space. The gesture did not question the urinal itself, but a more fundamental question: What counts as art? A century later, as AI generates images in seconds and quantum computers are about to leave the lab, the same question has resurfaced.

Ivan Liu, an assistant professor at the Institute of Applied Arts at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, spoke on Oct. 20 at the Fubon Law Lecture Hall in the College of Law at the invitation of Assistant Professor Lyn Chao-ling Chen of the Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence Center (IAIC) at National Chengchi University (NCCU). The talk was titled "AI as a Roadmap to Speculating on Emerging Aesthetics." Drawing on a path from physicist and tech artist to the Future Narratives Lab, Liu returned again and again to one central idea: The revolution of art lies in the constant search for new forms of expression, and technology is not merely a practical tool but in itself represents the culture and message of an era.

Liu noted that in Immanuel Kant's terms, aesthetics is the judgment of beauty; however, from the perspective of art history, the standard of beauty has never been fixed. Duchamp's use of ready-made objects to challenge the tradition of artists creating from a blank canvas, and the Futurist Luigi Russolo's argument in "The Art of Noises" that the sounds of industrial machinery had already become people's "nature" and should become material for art, among others, all reflect this view. From body art, photography and computer-generated images to bio art and AI art, every shift in medium has been accompanied by a redefinition of art.

"Of course art can still pursue truth, goodness and beauty," Liu said. "But in every era, the revolution of art has been a continuous search for new forms of art."

If art is always searching for new forms, what role does technology play? Citing the idea that "the medium is the message," Liu observed that people are used to emphasizing technology's practicality but rarely look at it from a cultural perspective. Take the keyboard for example: Résumés once commonly listed how many Chinese and English characters a person could type per minute. Today no one cares, because the keyboard itself is a mark of its era. Likewise, the rust and concrete houses of military dependents' villages, seen as symbols of backwardness 30 years ago, are now valued as "industrial style" aesthetics, simply because these scenes carry the imprint of an era.

This view also marks a turning point in Liu's own creative work. Early works used methods such as programmed interactive lighting and heat-sensitive pigments, making technology a tool for aesthetic expression. After the Future Narratives Lab was founded, technology and the traces it leaves behind became the subject itself. "Echoes of the Land" uses a device that scientists employ to simulate earthquakes to drive sound and light, exploring earthquakes induced by human activities such as dams, drilling and high-rise construction. The "Anthropocene Art" series uncovers the landscape of our era in Bangkok's power lines tangled like trees, chemical plants and piles of plastic bottles. "Behind its practical use, it represents a kind of culture and message," Liu said, noting that this is also how students are guided to look at objects in class.

With the explosion of AI and frontier technologies, this way of thinking has found a new testing ground. Liu compared generative AI to the Three-Eyed Raven in "Game of Thrones," which has lived for more than 1,000 years and knows everything about humanity: It is a database of humanity's collective culture. The lab asked AI what "quantum" looks like, then blended "quantum" in varying proportions with sofas, restaurants and cars, producing a series of "quantum-style" everyday objects. These images may not match scientific fact, but they faithfully reflect humanity's cultural imagination of the quantum. At the same time, the team also works from the bottom up, starting from physical principles and data visualization, to design a VR/AR quantum computer interface that can be controlled by hand.

Here, aesthetics is no longer only the judgment of beauty. Although it does not guarantee complete understanding, it is at least a gateway for the public to approach unfamiliar knowledge.

In addition to sharing his insights on aesthetics and research findings, Liu generously answered questions from the audience.

Liu used the invention of photography as an example to address the question of whether AI harms aesthetic literacy: Photography once made realist painters worry about losing their livelihoods, yet it also freed art from the need to imitate nature and opened a new path for contemporary art. AI allows people without an art background to create as well, and as the audience grows, it will ultimately come back to drive the development of art. On the criticism that contemporary art puts discourse ahead of the senses, Liu's response was equally open: "A work that sparks no discussion is a bad work."

As for how to use visual aesthetics to encourage audiences to dive deeper into quantum science, Liu noted that we need not limit our focus solely to it. Various everyday issues can create a sensory impact through artistic creation to leave a lasting impression on viewers, or alter their life experiences through embodied participation. And Liu's favorite creative approach is to create a strong contradiction: It is clearly garbage, so why can it be so poetic?

This question may well be the essence of the entire talk. From Duchamp's urinal and the noise of the industrial age to AI-generated quantum sofas, the definition of aesthetics has never been fixed; it is constantly rewritten by the technology and culture of each era. When technology is no longer seen merely as a tool but is understood as the language of its time, art has the chance to make us pause before familiar scenes and see anew the era we live in.