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AI will eventually surpass the human brain but getting jokes ... that could take time. (Geoffrey Hinton)
Exploring A/I Artistic Intelligence
Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method,
one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. (Donna Haraway)
ECODATA. - The 5th Open Fields conference on Artistic Research, Science and Technologies and RIXC Art Science Festival 2020; October 8–10, 2020, Riga. 8. October, 2020.
NOTE Program of the ECODATA festival HERE.
Sneak peek video
Performance duration
46 min.
YouTube documentation HERE
Performance format
Live/stream trans-media k/caleidoscopic multi-actor lecture performance.
Process performance/ ongoing: online multi-media platform/repository of the creative processes, including artifacts, reflections, discussions and debates
Project description
A group of more than 15 artists, scholars, and scientists with cultural roots in several continents (North America and Turtle Island, Central America, Asia, Africa, Europe) and across many time zones embarked on this adventure of alternative praxis between May and October 2020. The desire? Rattling the curve.
What emerged as the pattern of artistic intelligence, emotional survival and digital performance dramaturgy was that of a k/caleidoscopic imagination, where multiple fragments reflect and bounce off of each other, while still creating a space of multiplicity and coherent connection.
The project evolves around questions of imaging and imagining technologies, investigated by a group of multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual and multi-cultural creators from the arts and sciences. The first – imaging - is closely related to disruptions of artificial intelligence, the latter – imagining - is grounded in techniques of artistic intelligence. What is intelligence? What is ethics of intelligence? What is the politics of bias in A/I and AI? We propose an experimental and performative project to find out more.
Dramaturgy
As a result of live prototyping and creation online across multiple time zones, outdoors and at home, a k/caleidoscopic performance emerged. Mathematicians, engaged in computational complexity theory, have applied k/caleidoscopic dramaturgy just recently. "The goal (and peculiarity) of the Caleidoscope school is to reunite in a single event as many different takes on computational complexity as can reasonably be fit in one week.”
We, however, will attempt to share a live-stream performance on the complexity of A/I or artistic intelligence with you in under ONE HOUR. And this statement has to be taken with the pinch of a RED NOSE, of course.
Rattling
Originally we planned to build a live and participatory performance around a 1870s plate camera as a central actor along with audience-actors, creating and collecting live eco/bio data and facial recognition while processing performance and images. How do images and imagination relate? How does radical slowness impact perception, sensorial processing and creative (re)cognition? What is the dynamic between A/I (artistic intelligence) and AI (artificial intelligence)? What is the materiality of this reality?
Then the global pandemic hit the planet, continuously producing visualizations of the curve.
We embraced the challenge, experimenting and prototyping possibilities of live performance in social distancing mode both in creation and presentation. We worked a lot outdoors, in our homes or online. While busy with “flattening the curve” and a new appreciated for data visualization in the form of daily changing graphs, we were also RATTLING THE CURVE.
Paradoxes
Paradox 1: Why do we make square images with circular lenses? What are frames (of reference, of thought, of deceit, of history, of politics, of economics)?
Paradox 2: Insisting on human togetherness in physical spaces, how to abandon this key desire and build a trans-media performance that has to be flattened and robbed of its thought to be critical dimensions?
Paradox 3: Can we trust our perception of the world, our ECODATA input and output, when our sensory apparatus makes us perceive things that do not exist (like color or inverted image direction) but still potentially secures our species’ survival through such performances of fabrication?
Questions
Our project is situated in discourses and technological disruptions related to questions of intelligence. How is A/I or artistic intelligence offering a creative and playful question mark to the claimed certainties and doubtful promises of AI or artificial intelligence? How are ARTifice, ARTistic and ARTificial related? What’s intelligent about it? What is the relationship between art and craft and scientific art? How can we find out more in the self-reflecting process of making a multi-modal, multi-sensory live performance?
What if augmented trees and sand (cardboard box of a camera obscura or wooden constructions of historical plate cameras and reconstructions of the laterna magica, sand melt to glass/lenses) make imaginations/ facial recognitions of humans and trees? How are we activating techniques of collective artistic intelligence when making/facing problems? How do we perform live/ life when all physical spaces of gathering are closed down and bodies are in physical distancing mode?
Just as the human eye perceives of the world as upside down and its ECODATA must be augmented by an evolutionary trick of human brains - that takes the raw, inverted visual/photonic data and turns it into a coherent, right-side-up image - we are struggling to create a live performance – meant for a shared four-dimensional space-time of human and non-human bodies – into its paradoxical other on flattened surfaces (monitors, projection surfaces) existing on the internet. How? We will make these discoveries on our journey while rattling the curve.
Creative Team
Candy Blair, (Turtle Island, Canada) - dancer, choreograph
Antje Budde, (Canada, Germany) - artistic research director, digital dramaturg, media creator, performer, producer
Jill Carter, (Turtle Island, Canada) - land-based dramaturg, artistic director, performer
Felipe Cervera, (Singapore, Mexico) - media generating cyclist and performer
Lars Crosby, (Germany) - music and sound composer, performer
Nina Czegledy (Canada, Hungary) - media creator and human connector
Astad Deboo (India) - dancer, choreograph
Martin Kulinna (Germany) - plate camera and digital photographer
Amit Kumar (India) - videographer (for Astad Deboo)
Montgomery C. Martin (Canada) - magic lantern printer, performer
Karyn McCallum (Canada) - virtual space and interaction designer, drawing artist
DDL2 Oracle (WorldWideWeb)
Marta Orellana (Turtle Island, Canada) - costume designer (for Candy Blair)
George Bwanika Seremba (Canada, Uganda) - actor
Don Sinclair (Canada) - computational artist, interactive virtual space designer, performer
Heike Sommer (Germany) - videographer (for Martin Kulinna)
Grace Whiskin (Singapore, UK) - sign language performer
Vicki Zhang (Canada, China) - AI ethics consultant
