'Melting Memories' by Refik Anadol
'Melting Memories' offers insights into the representational possibilities emerging from the intersection of advanced technology and contemporary art. By showcasing several interdisciplinary projects that translate the elusive process of memory retrieval into data collections, the exhibition immersed visitors in Anadol’s creative vision of “recollection”.
“Science states meanings; art expresses them,” writes American philosopher John Dewey and draws a curious distinction between what he sees as the principal modes of communication in both disciplines. In Melting Memories, Refik Anadol’s expressive statements provide the viewer with revealing and contemplative artworks that will generate responses to Dewey’s thesis.
'Flow' by Alan Chamberlain
Alan Chamberlain uses Google Magenta Studio and other tools to use AI as a composing partner. By composing music and ‘feeding’ them into the system, then allowing the system to feedback suggestions based on the original composition one can start to experiment and choose the degree of randomness that fits with the emerging piece. “The process is a workflow, an emerging space where we can start to play with control and chaos”. Alan’s work highlights the skill, craft and knowledge needed to work with the outputs from AI-based systems and starts to unpack notions of autonomy, experience, humanity and randomness.
'El Salto (The Jump/ The Waterfall)' by Juan Covelli
'El Salto' is part of a body of work titled Mirages, a project integrates research and the history of landscape, and blends them with audiovisual production using tools such as AI, 3D capture, and modelling, along with game development software such as Unreal Engine, with the goal of making experimental video pieces that critically assess the policies of technology. Machine vision shows how media reshapes our conception of natural surroundings and landscape, given that it approaches what landscape supposes, besides recognizing an iconography, it discovers ways of thinking and understanding our surroundings framed within a specific culture and temporality.
'Artificial Remnants' by Sophia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick
How do we engage with the diversity of nature in digital space? Artificial Remnants is an exploration of artificial life using deep learning to generate insects as well as their names and anatomical descriptions. The intention is to celebrate the natural diversity of insectile life, not through the precise, sterile digital reproduction of it, but in the form of new specimens that are digital natives. Their decidedly digital qualities contrast with the unsurpassable creativity of natural selection but can act as a prism with which to approach new perspectives and appreciation of the vulnerable, non-human world.
'Conversations with Bina48' by Stephanie Dinkins
In 2014 I started interviewing Bina48, an advanced social robot. Conversations with Bina48 aims to get the robot to answer the question "who are your people? And, answering the question, Can an artist and a social robot build a relationship over time? After a few meetings, it became apparent that though Bina48 presents as a black woman, her retorts often derive from the white men who programmed her. Though seeded with the memories (data) of a black American, the robot’s underlying code and decision-making do not adequately address the concerns or trauma of people of colour.
'Zizi - Queering the Dataset' by Jake Elwes
'Zizi - Queering the Dataset' tackles the lack of representation and diversity in the training datasets often used by facial recognition systems. The video was made by disrupting these systems* and re-training them with the addition of drag and gender fluid faces found online. This causes the weights inside the neural network to shift from normative identities into a space of queerness. ‘Zizi - Queering The Dataset’ lets us peek inside the machine learning system and visualise what the neural network has (and hasn’t) learnt. It celebrates difference and ambiguity, which invites us to reflect on bias in our data driven society.
'Covid-19 AI Battle' by Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm
An artificial intelligence battle between Donald Trump and the WHO, where two politically biased AIs challenge each other and the audience about the “right” interpretation of “reality”.
Accessible through the internet, the artwork Covid-19 AI Battle consists of two artificially intelligent algorithms, which discuss Covid-19 in real-time. It is a digital battleground, where audiences can experience the Trump algorithm duke it out against the WHO algorithm in ascribing meaning and understanding to all matters Covid-19 related. Here audiences can engage with the AIs as they, too, are able to participate in the discursive war of words.
'Zeitgeist' by Olive Gingrich and Shama Rahman
'Zeitgeist' uses machine learning algorithms to indicate ‘Flow’, turning the artwork into an interface of creative collaborative practices. 'Zeitgeist' measures whether audiences are in a Flow mental state, a state of increased creative stimulation, reduced stress and increased relaxation. 'Zeitgeist' analyses this data and represents Flow states as visual cues - a process called ‘nudging’. Lighter colours and more complex forms represent a heightened state of Flow. Visual cues provide information on Flow as measured via an EEG – an electroencephalogram which records brain activity. A proprietary deep-learning algorithm compares these inputs to a brainwave signature pattern of Flow.
'Going Viral' by Jennifer Gredecki & Derek Curry
'Going Viral' is an interactive artwork that invites people to intervene in the spreading of misinformation by sharing informational videos about COVID-19 that feature algorithmically generated celebrities, social media influencers, and politicians that have previously shared misinformation about coronavirus. In the videos, the influencers deliver public service announcements or present news stories that counter the misinformation they have promoted on social media. The videos are made using a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) that is trained on sets of two images where one image becomes a map to produce a second image.
'Through Machine & Darkness' by Julie F Hill
Responding to the increasing use of AI and machine learning in examining astronomical datasets, 'Through Machine & Darkness' uses a DCGAN (Deep Convolutional General Adversarial Network) used in unsupervised machine learning to produce photo-realistic images. The system was trained on pictures from the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Telescope. Comprising thousands of outputs, the video explores the latent space of the algorithmic imagination, and through computation, we come to know the universe. The meditative pace of the video slows the algorithmic operations to provide a contemplative experience that oscillates between the human, celestial and technological.
'Climb!' by Maria Kallionpää
'Climb!' is a musical composition to be performed by a pianist and supporting technician that combines the ideas of a classical virtuoso piece and a computer game. Written for a Disklavier grand piano and interactive electronics, 'Climb!' is an indeterminate work of 26 sections that form three paths with cross-links between. This results in an open formal structure which culminates in a new reading in each performance. Although not programmatic, a ‘game like’ narrative underpins 'Climb!', namely ascending a mountain. The climber (i.e. pianist) encounters challenges where success or failure may steer their subsequent route.
'Internet Humans' by Fabiola Larios
Larios visualises selfies as a combined Internet self-portrait. 'Internet Humans' explores machine learning by combining it with the trend of taking selfies with social-media filters. The work defines ‘Internet Humans’ as neural self-portraits generated from the combined trend of selfie augmentation. It then extends the history of self-portraits as a category of image. Public images as self-representation have morphed from 17th-century painted portraits to 21st-century selfies accessible on the internet and social media. A self-portrait which was once an image created by painters only for those with economic reach is now an everyday feature in smartphone cameras.
'The Chaos of Raw Unknowing' by Neus Torres Tamarit & Ben Murray
Our film explores trust and the danger of anthropomorphising AI. The efficiency of AI in some domains, say facial recognition, may underpin the assumption that computers see like us, and therefore have human-like understanding. We used Facebook Detectron2 AI to distinguish and identify elements within Michaelangelo’s The Dream of Human Life in the UK’s National Gallery. Facebook trained Detectron2 on photographs and scenes from everyday life. Somewhat unfairly, we ask the system to identify elements within a painting that lacks the cues available within photographs. Ben Murray reflects on why a trivial human activity challenges the capacity of today’s AI.
'The MOMENT' by Richard Ramchurn
'The MOMENT' is an adaptive, interactive brain-controlled film that explores contemporary issues of fake and manipulated social media content, digital fascism and how algorithms can influence behaviours, and social trends. This is told through a dystopic sci-fi lens where social media is implemented at a neural level. The viewer's neural reactions are measured by an electroencephalography (EEG) device which uses machine learning to derive their attention. The film's narrative is then constructed in real time as the viewer's rhythms of attention are reflected as cinematic techniques making each viewing of 'The MOMENT' unique to that individual.
'Models for Environmental Literacy' by Tivon Rice
With the long-term research project and experimental films ‘Models for Environmental Literacy’, Tivon Rice speculates how AIs could have alternative perceptions of an environment. Artificial intelligence is used on a planetary scale to detect, analyze and manage landscapes. In the West, there is a great belief in ‘intelligent’ technology as a lifesaver. However, practice shows that the dominant AI systems lack the fundamental insights to act in an inclusive manner towards the complexity of ecological, social, and environmental issues. This, while the imaginative and artistic possibilities for the creation of non-human perspectives are often overlooked.
'sketches with+for+from ai' by Metem Sahin
'sketches with+for+from ai' consists of sketches in which the artist tries to understand her style, her works’ symbiotic relationship with machine learning, the new world order, and her position in that order. The first animation on the left 'Let go of the dead' is a starting point of all these sketched shrines, pointed arched doors to other actualities, abstractions, and/or microcosms. They carry their heads almost like a baby, which shows that they lost their lives, and are in a new reality already, while moaning with a silent smile. It begins the “new not normal.”
