Abstract This article presents Gates from the Body (1972), an installation by artist Juan Navarro Baldeweg, as a foundational artwork in the history of art and AI. It illuminates the context of the installation’s creation at MIT, where Navarro worked with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (helmed by Gyorgy Kepes) and the Architecture Machine Group (helmed by Nicholas Negroponte) and encountered concepts drawn from cybernetics and AI research. Navarro took up the idea (sourced from Kepes) that art functioned as an analogic model, revealing structural equivalences across organic and technological worlds. He became fascinated (through Negroponte) by the perceptron, an image classifier, which was modeled on the optical neuron. In Gates from the Body, Navarro created an analogic model of a perceptron; incorporating sensors, wires, and illuminated boxes, the installation captured and processed images of its viewers, presenting those viewers with mechanically produced reflections of themselves. This installation probed the metaphorical equivalences between mind and machine underpinning AI research and revealed the viewer’s entanglement in cybernetic systems, disrupting humanistic conceptions of the subject and introducing cyborgian alternatives. Navarro’s project demonstrated that art and AI are assumed to operate in similar ways: as reflections of ourselves which make us aware of our subjectivity and incite us to probe its limits and potentials anew. This article reconsiders what constitutes “AI art,” suggesting that the term should encompass all art that is forged in the epistemological framework of AI (not just images produced using generative AI) and that it is especially useful for describing artworks that interrogate how AI technologies reflect and affect our understanding of the self.
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