M’s art lab

It cannot have escaped anyone that artificial intelligence is undergoing a meteoric rise. But can AI also make young people feel excited about art? ‘M’s art lab’ is a brand new participation project with an accompanying web tool that aims to find out.

At M, the art lab project is being led by a working group whose members include Marlies Verreydt and Sofie Vermeiren. They were joined by Charlotte Vandooren, educational expert at the citizen science project ‘amai!’.

Marlies: “At M, we think it is very important to involve our visitors in everything we do. We organise a project every two years to help give that public participation shape. The previous one was ‘The Ten’: Ten visitors choosing ten favourite works from our collection. The result will be on exhibition at M until the end of April 2024.”

“The pandemic meant that ‘The Ten’ had to be done mostly online. That was a stopgap solution, but it made us realise that the digital world offers many exciting new opportunities.”

Sofie: “We took that idea with us in ‘The Art Lab of M’, but this time we focused on secondary school kids and we hope for a wider reach than ‘The Ten’. ‘M’s art lab’ targets schoolchildren from Leuven, the rest of Flanders and even the Netherlands.”

“We did not have much information about the latest digital developments in education ourselves. So we sought advice from imec and hey referred us to Charlotte.”

Before the hype

Charlotte: “When M and Kpot, the company that built the web tool, got in touch to test their idea for ‘M’s art lab’ with us, We immediately became excited.”

“I am an educationalist by training and I know what it is like to stand in front of a classroom. Nowm, I work for Scivil, part of the RFO Society. It is named after the late Roger Van Overstraeten, founder of imec. He wanted his company to have social impact too. Along with a few partners, Scivil has launched the ‘amai!’ project. That aims to involve citizens in the development of AI applications.”

Marlies: “Early this year, AI suddenly became a huge media hype but we were ahead of the trend (laughs).”

Sofie: “At first, we were worried that AI would be too difficult or overbearing for the classroom, but Charlotte was able to reassure us. Based on her tips and advice, we developed a tool that teachers and students can use to get started in an approachable, intuitive way.”

Charlotte: “You can go two ways with AI in education. You can frantically try to keep it away from the classroom, or accept that it exists and help your students deal with it correctly. This is nothing new, by the way. The same happened before with the rise of the Internet, and before that of the calculator. AI is not going to go away. More and more schools realise this, but are unsure what exactly it means and how to deal with it. Teachers also realise that they are less familiar with it than their students. There is a great deal of need for guidance and information, and ‘M’s art lab’ tries to fill some of that gap.”

Christ with fire-breathing dragon

Marlies: “M places great importance on visual literacy, the ability to interpret visual language. That’s a basic skill in our visual culture. That is why we wanted to do something around ‘image generation’, tools that allow you to create new images yourself using AI. In ‘M’s art lab’, we link those tools to art experience and creation.”

“Let me explain how it works. We have named the web tool Hetkunstlabvanm.be. Students will find 30 images of works from M’s collection, each with a short explanation, an audio clip and viewing assignments. There is loads of variation in terms of periods, materials and mediums, subjects... Several works also link to current educational themes, such as identity or colonial heritage. So they are great for history or cultural studies classes, for example.”

Sofie: “Out of those 30 works, students choose one that appeals to them, with or without consulting the teacher. They then watch a short tutorial on the site, a witty video explaining AI and how it works. They also learn how to draft a prompt, which is a short text describing the chosen image. They can then enter that prompt into an AI tool – they have a choice of several tools, each with different uses. The tool generates three or four images based on their prompt. The results are quite stunning and the resemblance with the original image is sometimes really striking. They can play around with that, and then choose the best image, which they can then upload to the site and share with the whole of Flanders. Over time, this will create a permanent expo of digitally generated images.”

Marlies: “Hetkunstlabvanm.be introduces the kids to AI and teaches them how to write a prompt. But they can also go beyond that. For example, writing a prompt for Bouts’s ‘The Last Supper’, but replacing one apostle at the table with a fire-breathing dragon, just as an idea (laughs). They really do a lot of creative freedom. But there is a filter on the system to avoid inappropriate content.”

What is art?

Sofie: “With ‘M’s art lab’, we also want to appeal to teachers who do not currently use art in their lessons. Our hope is that they pick up the site this school year and then work with it every year. The site will remain online.”

Marlies: “‘M’s art lab’ also raises interesting questions currently being asked in abundance in the art world. Is art by definition a personal creation? Even if you let a computer do the work? What about copyrights?”

Charlotte: “The discussion about AI is also very much alive in education, this is only the beginning. That is why it is so cool that M is supporting this initiative. This is not a dry, classroom explanation of AI, but a concrete application that the students can work with themselves, and which also introduces them to art. We are very curious to see how it will catch on.”