AESTHETIC GLITCHES, ENHANCED PERFORMANCES

Building better futures with AI in the arts and humanities?

In collaboration with academic and artistic partners from Scotland and Germany, the Goethe-Institut Glasgow seeks to facilitate thinking and discussion about the relationship between AI and the art world.​

We have arrived at a point in history where artworks created by artificial intelligence are winning prestigious prizes. Artists in dance, theatre, design, performance, and music engage with artificial intelligence and seek to open up new fields of artistic expression. Meanwhile, the interest and recognition for cutting-edge algorithms in the creative industries are ever increasing. Only last year in 2018, the famous auction house Christie's announced that they will sell an artwork made by artificial intelligence ­- an algorithm developed by the French art collective Obvious – sparking a critical and lively debate around the originality of the open-source algorithm itself. It was even proposed that the next winner of the Turner Prize could be an AI.

However, from apocalyptic sci-fi films to wild public speculation about the automation of life, AI is thought of to be either “a powerful tool that we might be unable to master, or as a tool that might acquire agency of its own and turn against us” (Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence). In her recent book Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble even challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. The ethical weaknesses of algorithms and data usage are presenting real social problems.

How do artists foster our imaginations about what artificial intelligence might mean in a desirable and more inclusive future? How do imagination, trust and empathy play out in the entanglement of arts and artificial intelligence? Will research and practice in the arts and humanities be able to facilitate a better understanding of state-of-the-art AI technologies? Can they tackle the political realities of these technologies and help harness the transformative power of AI for good?

Speakers:

Interrobang (Nina Tecklenburg, Till Müller-Klug), performance company (Germany)
Sarah Cook, Professor in Museum Studies (University of Glasgow) and curator for NeON festival
Elisa Lindinger, Director of the Prototype Fund (Germany)
Anna Henschel, Social Robotics Lab (University of Glasgow)

Moderated by Mario Verdicchio, founder of xCoAx (University of Bergamo)

Hosted by the Goethe-Institut Glasgow
Curated by Anika Marschall