Getting prepared to attend one of the major global events featuring art, technology and society, I realized I was off to a marathon of 500+ events; exhibitions, panels, shows, concerts, labs and immensely diverse creative content showcasing unique projects at the intersection of arts, science and technology.
This year’s theme was Out Of the Box: Midlife Crisis of Digital Revolution. In the tiny city of Linz, there were two main locations for the event, the Ars Electronica Centre on the one end and PostCity on the other, and 14 different locations including monasteries, churches, galleries, university campuses in between. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed and wished there was some sort of a zip function to take most of it in. Here is a mini digital crisis… there is no such function! At least not yet.
The schedule of events, or rather the program booklet was 446 pages! I was torn between the engraved impulse for ‘you need to plan ahead’ and an urge for ‘go with the flow and surprise yourself for a change!’ I ended up somewhere in the middle, as I was at the same time completely unsure of what to expect. I was anxious to get in touch with artists, scientists and technologists and talk about their journey into the wild! Following an immersion in theory and literature for months, I would finally be touching and feeling where technology and science meets artistic expressions creating a rich realm of experiences, triggering new ideas and possibly leading to painstaking detours in this study!!
The Festival highlight and opening event was the concert staging Mahler-Unfinished – Music meets AI”, which was an encounter between orchestral and electronic music, human and robotic dancers performing on an artificial intelligence platform. I have a feeling Mahler did not see this coming! Bruckner Orchestra was on stage, full flesh, and the choreography featured two dancers, a human one accompanied by a fairly big size robot (taking approximately 1/4th of the stage). I have to say that the size had a magnifying effect on the non-human element. The bunker stage was packed, we could not all fit in so I watched the concert from a distance, and from where I could see, I suspected that both might be machines. Makes you wonder what it will mean to share the same space when you interact socially with machines? Will we be less human, or will the machines become less machine-like at this encounter? In which directions will this relationship evolve? Meanwhile, I was wondering… why are we talking about a midlife crisis at this point? What is this crisis about? I will come back to that in a while.
Walking into the Ars Electronica Center I was soon struck by the notion of ‘lab’, which lies at the core of Ars Electronica pursuits. Future Lab, Citizen Lab, Alternative Body Lab,… the intersection of art and science seemed to transform the concept of a lab -in my mind at least- from being the ‘engineered, aloof space’ for scientific investigation to an inclusive space for curious minds looking into possibilities for a better quality of life and responsible living. The exhibitions were organized around two ends of a spectrum entitled ‘Human Limitations and Limited Humanity’. The idea is to explore our relationship between humanity and the environment and our limitation therein. Alongside our intent to advance the technology use, which often bears an unforeseen impact, our challenge becomes reflecting upon our socio-ethical obligations arising from our interaction with technology and environment at the same time. And the task at hand was not only crafting solutions, but also and maybe more so asking speculative questions triggered by the artistic mind. To get the reader closer to the experience, I would like to name a few of the exhibit pieces…
The first part focusing on ‘Human Limitations’ exhibited several projects addressing the topic on an individual level. With the use of body extensions, microchip implants and genetic methods we have the ability to alter and adapt the human body. The Alternative Limb Project by Sophie de Oliviera Barata from UK [takes on the concept of self-expression through fashion and applies the same outlook on a state of physical disability. Prosthetics becomes an object of fashionable design, redefined by transformation as opposed to absence. The project combines traditional craftsmanship with advanced technology calling for co-design and making with artists and engineers. There were other examples such as a Lego arm extension fit for the body of a child, with full motor skills to grab, touch and shoot beams from fingertips J Is it possible by means of altering our visual perception to change our notions of disability or physical limitation and therefore our social adaptive behaviours? Or to what extent will we be dependent on biological enhancements in the future?
‘Limited Humanity’, approaches the subject from the perspective of societal limitations, which we create in the example of climate change, refugee issues, mass surveillance and big data for instance. In my perception, this aspect has a stronger resonance with a ‘crisis’ situation. These exhibits had artefacts contemplating our grip on what’s real, what really matters, how to be responsible humans in touch with our conscience, core values as we socially and technologically construct our future? Many of us enjoy the magical world of animation… Yet, how many are victimized personally or politically to the same underlying deep fake technology? These are deceptively genuine seeming photos, made using neural networks. Same technology creates videos of people broadcasting the speeches they never had delivered. Modern time ghosts they look like… they don’t exist but their appearance does. In this exhibit piece, except for the source pictures (A & B), none of these people are real, however much they seem to be. They are the products of a form of GAN (generative adversarial network). One of our visual verification systems for assessing what’s real is now being challenged by the AI technology. The possibilities for application are endless with equally endless dimensions on their ethical, economical and societal implications.
As my next destination, I headed for PostCity. There, one physically dives into the tunnels, bunkers and truly get immersed in the diversity of exhibits, ideas, and talks.
Here, one of the thematic focuses was on humanizing artificial intelligence. As we revolutionize the digital, we entertain more biological concerns around how we interact and build social connections with the machines and look more into the biological systems to design more socially robust technologies. In one panel the discussions revolved around what’s next? Where are we headed with the digital transformation, the media, and self-learning algorithms? Will the machines take over? Fortunately, the answer to the last question for the foreseeable future is ‘quite unlikely’, at least from what I could see through the clouds of it. Simply put we are not able to simulate the human brain, there is yet too much unknown about the neural networks and brain biochemistry that an algorithm to override or supersede an unknown parameter is simply far reaching. And then there were a few reassuring examples like the GPT - Generative Pre-trained Transformer, an immensely advanced AI technology based on Natural Language Processing. The system is trained to produce text-based information. It has been fed with texts from 8 million web pages, has the ability to take 1.5 billion parameters into account to produce real looking multi-paragraph texts based on predicting the next word possibilities given by human prompted texts of a few words. These texts were grammatically flawless and contextually logical. It had learned to generate informative sentences using a language known to us. I noticed though, that none of those texts featured a question, or an investigative statement. The element of human curiosity was missing… maybe it is a coincidence maybe that was not the initial purpose of the algorithm. Nevertheless one possibility this was signalling was the emergence for instance of AI authorship. Are we looking into AI-generated literature in the future, can algorithms produce their own genres? What would an AI-created literature mean for future publishing industry? Or what opportunities and risks could this impose on the future of journalism?
My notes on observations, talks, discussions are quite some pages long, maybe I’ll continue with a series later on. But my intention was to share a flavour of one of the most prominent events at the intersection of art, science and technology. This space is what I live, breathe and consume for my study, so it was naturally invaluable for me. I would like to leave you with a few remarks though. There were at the same time a lot of discussions on the value of art for science and visa versa, whether a third culture is possible or will there always be a strongly felt gorge between the two. How do we define the resulting hybrid forms or expressions? How do we approach measures of rigour for artistic and scientific research at the same time? Do we even have language constructs to critically engage with the world at the intersection of art, science and technology? While there were as many voices as the number of participants on these discussions, a common ground was also forming around the idea that there is a perceived complementarity in this wide inter / transdisciplinary environment. While science seeks some form of a validated truth of existing phenomena, art has the potential to ask speculative, sometimes even disconcerting questions, which relate to the pressing global issues of today and the future. Humanity is in dire need for an integrative mindset among art, science and technology to construct and reconstruct meaning. One of the neuroscientists said during his presentation that he had stepped down from the ivory tower of science after his artist resident took him to his laboratory in a remote part of Senegal. Projecting the famous duck-rabbit sketch, he concluded by saying that there is usually more than one reality and both are relevant. As such, I started enjoying my journey at the intersection of art, science and technology, looking at the direction of ducks and rabbits in search of reconstructed new meanings.
Author
Zeynep Birsel, PhD candidate, ESHCC - Arts & Culture Studies.
My research is on transdisciplinarity in creative industries focusing on the convergence between art, science and technology. The study will investigate integrated knowledge creation, in wide interdisciplinary or often transdisciplinary encounters involving artists, scientists and technologists.