Naturally Artificial Intelligence Art Association
Oleksandr SIROUS. Hidden Invasions. Jade APACK. Telluric Clock. Svitlana USYCHENKO
The idea of unstable connections as a system that is constantly looking for new ways to communicate. For years, the Photinus studio collective has been in a temporal search for such systems, from a web performance that critically rethinks communication and movement through space during COVID-19, a participatory digital garden that works socio-political views into the elements of the garden ecosystem, to the creation of a mechanism that allows all Photinus studio members to colaborate in a common space from different parts of the world and different life situations. Our goal is to talk about this process and the methods we have developed, as well as to demonstrate some of them in the format of a live workshop or performance.
Oleksandr Sirous is an Ukrainian new media artist and active member of the Photinus Studio. I work with big data sets and the principles of interaction and communication in web environments, as well as create complex simulation environments using AI.My background in animation and comics has influenced my practice, leading me to constantly find a non-trivial approach to storytelling and composition in media works. Recently, because of my work with game engines, I have turned more and more to the culture of video games and various game mechanics and new rules of interaction, thus finding new approaches at the intersection of the already established approaches in media art and video games.
Jade Apack is a French architect, artist and independent researcher based in Paris. Her work revolves around the notion of transparency in territorial planning. She uses transparency as a lever for engagement in participatory, artistic and political forms of action. To this end, she formally reinvests tools of power in a poetic and speculative way: she questions legal texts, maps, protocols and norms of territorial representation and administration, through the design of objects, installations and the organization of meetings – workshops, discussions and events.
Mónica RIKIĆ. Hipertèlia
Hipèrbole (2023) is a mechanical artistic installation and algorithmic experiment dedicated to design and develop an alternative cognitive machine, built from handcrafted electronics. This machine intentionally diverges from the predominant use of mainstream AI techniques, such as Machine Learning. Instead, it aspires to be recognized by the audience as cognitive, emphasizing its operational characteristics and code structure. Unlike other proposals at the intersection between AI and art, which often focus on the creative potential of machines, this project investigates and experiments with the essential characteristics that artificial cognitive systems must possess in order to be recognized as existing, conscious organisms. Only after this process of autonomy of technical systems can we genuinely discuss the creativity of machines.
This installation explores cognitive processes in machines by examining two primary facets: (1) algorithmic computation, which involves the structure and execution of code, and (2) physical computation, which pertains to how this structure and execution are manifested in the machine’s physical composition.
In this installation, both the code and the machine are visible to the audience.The main goal of the proposal is to challenge the predominant role of spoken and written language in cognitive expression and human-machine communication. Particular emphasis is placed on embodied expression through its handcrafted robotics configuration. The primary artistic strategy for experimentation involves designing diverse mechanical personalities that allow the devices to communicate and assume roles, encouraging audience recognition as similar and different, but non-threatening. The ultimate goal is to evoke perceptions of existence and consciousness in these mechanical organisms.
Carolyn KIRSCHNER. Imaginaries of the Far North: Machine Senses and Digital Ecologies
Synthetic machine senses play an increasingly central role in shaping understandings of and interactions with planetary ecologies.
In the Arctic Ocean, remote sensing technologies are deployed in growing numbers, tasked with gathering data and transmitting digital fragments of the landscape across the globe. The resulting imagery is used to steer geopolitical, economic, and environmental activity in the far north, and is foundational to shaping imaginaries of a landscape only few will ever encounter in person.
This paper explores questions of power, authorship, and bias in the construction of remote sensing imagery – in processes currently dominated by extractive industries and nation states – and speculates on ways in which the perceptive and imaginative capacities of machines could disrupt and expand prevailing environmental discourse. Beyond their role as scientific instruments, I will consider their potential as design tools: as image making and world building tools.
Drawing on excerpts from an ongoing design and research project, I will share a series of alternative, experimental approaches to working with machine senses and environmental data, which acknowledge the collective intelligence of geo-sensing infrastructures, and consider expanded possibilities for symbiosis between instrument, human, and non-human worlds in the far north.
Carolyn Kirschner is a designer and researcher with a background in architecture. Her work explores the growing entanglements of ecologies and machines in the context of the climate crisis. Working with scientific tools and technologies she produces fragments from alternate or expanded worlds, with a particular interest in realms which lie beyond the reach of human senses. Her work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou (2023), ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2022), and A/D/O in Brooklyn (2020). Publications include Perspecta (2021), The Polar Silk Road (2021), and Visual Ecologies of Placemaking (2024). She is a Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Mona HEDAYATI. Techno-Performance Imaginaries: Symbiotic Sensing As Expanded Nervous System
Human-machine entanglements emerge not from inherent qualities but through dynamic intra-actions and tensions that arise between the natural and the artificial. While the pervasiveness of networked machines expands human sensory receptors beyond capacity through externalized sensory perception, it also allows for acting upon the world using the affordances of networked computerized systems as mediators. An expanded nervous system can be a metaphor to refer to this entanglement since the technological proliferation exposes us to a ‘dispositif’ which seriously begins to resemble a planetary nervous system with an unprecedented scale that allows for orchestrated sensing loops to serve as eyes and ears. Curves & Reverb is an art-science project that grapples with biosensors, their visual and auditory representation, and the technical pipeline used to make sense of them as part of this planetary nervous system. The project highlights embodied sensing through natural sense perception and machine sensory information collected from the body that need to be consolidated against one another for a final sensemaking out of both streams of information. The representation of sensor data as visualization and sonification thus clearly illustrates the destabilization and reconfiguration of embodied sensing and the new symbiotic nervous system created across the human-machine actors for a natural-artificial sensing mechanism.
Mona Hedayati is an artist-researcher engaged in a dual PhD in interdisciplinary humanities and artistic research in Canada and Belgium. She has an MFA in digital media and a Master of Research in social-political art and design. Working across computation arts, sensory anthropology, and STS, Hedayati’s work has been disseminated internationally across artistic and scientific institutions given the hybrid nature of her work. These venues are as diverse as Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence, Darmstadt, Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp, NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, Mesh Festival, Basel, IMPAKT center, Utrecht and Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, among many others. As an educator, Hedayati teaches courses at MA and Master of Research level on the intersection of theory and practice.