St. Petersburg Opens an Exhibition Blending Human and AI Art
The show brings together paintings and drawings created by people and neural networks, inviting visitors to decide where creativity truly begins—and ends.
A new exhibition in St. Petersburg blurs the line between human imagination and artificial intelligence. Titled “Contours of St. Petersburg,” the project—organized by the Gogol Library—features works created both by artists and a neural network, exploring how traditional and modern technologies interpret the image of the city.
The central theme of the exhibition is “Dostoevsky’s, Pushkin’s, and Gogol’s St. Petersburg.” Through painting and graphic art, participants—both human and machine—present their own vision of the city and its literary figures. Each piece reimagines the emotional landscape of Russia’s cultural capital through a different lens: the poetic, the psychological, and now, the algorithmic.
Human and Machine Creativity
One of the exhibition’s highlights is an interactive experiment: among the works on display, one painting will be shown anonymously, and visitors will be asked to guess whether it was created by a person or an AI model.
According to the organizers, the project is meant to spark reflection on the nature of creativity. Can artificial intelligence truly create? Can it compete with human imagination?
To explore these questions, experts from the Moscow School of Programmers will host lectures on the influence of technology on modern art and everyday life. The exhibition challenges audiences to reconsider the boundaries of artistic expression—and to imagine what creativity might look like when humans and algorithms share the same canvas.
