UmArts organises public talks about Art and AI as part of the TAIGA FrAIday lunchtime talks at Ume\u00e5 University. The UmArts online program introduces artists, writers, curators, designers and architects who are contributing to the social and ethical discourses of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. The Art & AI talks are moderated by WASP-HS Guest Professor Sarah Cook. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The FrAIday talks take place every Friday 12.15-13.00 CET. You can read about the whole series and register for the zoom link here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n See below for speaker profiles and abstracts:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" UmArts Art and AI talks introduce artists, curators, designers and architects who are contributing to the social and ethical discourses of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1149,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","categories":[71],"tags":[],"people":[],"class_list":["post-487","programme","type-programme","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fraiday-talks"],"acf":{"is_viewable_online":true,"repeating_events":[{"event_header_information":{"event_date":"20240301","event_title":"Alan Warburton: The Wizard of AI","time_from":"12:15 pm","time_to":"1:00 pm"},"event_short_text":" Alan Warburton<\/a> is an artist, animator, author, curator and video essayist working with CGI, VR, AR, installation and sculpture. Warburton’s animated films and critical video essays investigate computer graphics and visual culture. He’s currently researching digital images and labour for a PhD at Birkbeck\u2019s Vasari Centre in London<\/a>.<\/p>\n Warburton’s most recent film The Wizard of AI (2023) is a 20 minute video essay about generative AI, produced one year after the release of Midjourney v4. Treating this particular release in November \u201822 as an historic moment in visual cultures and creative economies, the essay focuses on the real impacts this technology continues to have on artists and designers around the world. The video itself was produced using generative AI tools, and is 99% comprised of images and videos created with Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Runway and Pika. Yet the artist is careful not to give in to the \u2018wonderpanic\u2019 brought about by generative AI, using generative AI tools themselves to discuss and critique the legal, aesthetic and ethical problems engendered by AI-automated platforms.<\/p>\n The Wizard of AI was commissioned by: Data as Culture at the ODI.\u00a0<\/a>Visit their Wizard of AI page here.<\/a><\/p>\n Warburton has previously received commissions from the BBC, Tate Modern, Photographers Gallery and Channel 4; exhibited work at Transmediale, Ars Electronica, National Gallery of Australia and undertaken residencies and given lectures at the V&A, Somerset House, Carnegie Mellon and the Architecture Association School.<\/p>\n"},{"event_header_information":{"event_date":"20240202","event_title":"Sarah Cook in conversation with Paola Torres","time_from":"12:15 pm","time_to":"1:00 pm"},"event_short_text":" Curator Sarah Cook will introduce the challenges and intrigues of commissioning new art and exhibitions which investigate the fast changing aesthetics of Art and AI.<\/p>\n Paola Torres is a doctoral candidate in Stockholm (Stockholms Konstn\u00e4rliga H\u00f6gskola), an artist, curator and researcher. She will be in conversation with Sarah Cook about curating the exhibition Sentient Machines together with Chat-GPT-3, and about the Futureless Festival and the ideas and goals behind it.<\/p>\n Dr Sarah Cook is the UmArts Guest Professor of Art and AI at Bildmuseet and Ume\u00e5 School of Architecture, supported by WASP-HS; and Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Glasgow.<\/p>\n"},{"event_header_information":{"event_date":"20231201","event_title":"Alana Kushnir","time_from":"12:00 pm","time_to":"12:45 pm"},"event_short_text":" How do existing laws affect AI-assisted art? What types of legal issues arise at each layer of the AI production stack?<\/p>\n Machine learning tools are being adopted by a growing number of artists to assist in the creation of artworks. While we are witnessing new laws and policies being developed to address the risks of AI more generally, several existing areas of law already do interfere with this innovative way of art-making. This talk will explore those existing areas of law – particularly intellectual property, contract and privacy – by analysing the legal issues that can arise at each layer of the AI production stack, from its base physical layers to its various protocol layers. Presented as part of the ongoing research of the Serpentine Legal Lab and Creative AI Lab.<\/p>\n Alana Kushnir<\/a> is an art lawyer, advisor and curator based in Melbourne, Australia. In addition to being the Founder and Director of Guest Work Agency and Guest Club<\/a>, she is\u00a0the Principal Investigator of the Serpentine\u2019s<\/a> Legal Lab<\/a>, a space for investigating legal issues and prototyping accessible legal solutions for the arts technologies field. She is\u00a0also a Board Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), and a regular writer on art news and exhibition reviews for Broadsheet Media, and a member of the Art, Cultural Institutions and Heritage Law Committee of the International Bar Association.<\/p>\n Kushnir is a finalist for the 2022 Lawyers Weekly Australian Law Awards Sole Practitioner of the Year and Innovator of the Year categories, and was a finalist in Blockchain Australia\u2019s inaugural \u2018Blockies\u2019 Awards for Educator of the Year in 2021.<\/p>\n"},{"event_header_information":{"event_date":"20231103","event_title":"Tega Brain","time_from":"12:00 pm","time_to":"12:45 am"},"event_short_text":" Artists engaging with recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence continue a long history of artistic work that explores the politics and unintended consequences of computational technologies through strategies like hacking, misuse and open-ended experimentation. Within this context Tega will share recent work that examines the possibilities and limitations of data, quantification and artificial intelligence in environmental inquiry and ecological management. Might new technologies like AI produce new ecological relations or do they simply reinforce existing power structures? How are artists re-imagining these technologies and their role in our lives?<\/p>\n Tega Brain<\/a> is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure. She has created digital networks that are controlled by environmental phenomena, systems for obfuscating personal data, and a wildly popular, online smell-based dating service. Her work has been commissioned and exhibited by museums and galleries worldwide. She is a 2023 Creative Capital awardee, an Industry Associate Professor of Integrated design and Media, New York University, and her first book, Code as Creative Medium, is coauthored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press.<\/p>\n"},{"event_header_information":{"event_date":"20230609","event_title":"Stephen Marche","time_from":"12:15 am","time_to":"1:00 pm"},"event_short_text":" Stephen Marche is a Canadian essayist and novelist who has been experimenting with AI since 2017. In this FrAIday talk Marche will be in conversation with curator Sarah Cook to discuss his creative process of using AI to write The Death of an Author <\/a>\u00a0a groundbreaking, suspenseful experiment in the meta world of man meets machine.<\/p>\n Sarah Cook<\/strong> is Guest Professor in Art & AI with UmArts in partnership with Ume\u00e5 School of Architecture and Bildmuseet. She is Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Glasgow.<\/p>\n Stephen Marche<\/a> <\/strong>is the author of half a dozen books, including The Next Civil War<\/em>, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century <\/em>(2016) and The Hunger of the Wolf <\/em>(2015). He has written opinion pieces and essays for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Walrus <\/em>and many others. He was been working on AI since 2017 and has published the first AI-generated novel reviewed in The New York Times, Death of an Author.<\/p>\n"},{"event_header_information":{"event_date":"20230526","event_title":"Irini Papadimitriou\u00a0","time_from":"12:15 pm","time_to":"1:00 pm"},"event_short_text":" Irini Papadimitriou, Magic, Myth and AI: <\/strong>Today we see a deluge of applications of AI around us \u2014 from song, video or shopping recommendations to Siri\u2019s assistance, navigation and facial recognition. At the same time, we are saturating the world with Generative AI technologies producing huge amounts of content varying from images, audio, text or synthetic data. How are present and future narratives about the world being shaped by AI, who holds the power and control over these systems and whose lives are affected? This talk will explore these questions, art\u2019s role engaging with AI and ethical issues that arise from the production of these technologies.<\/p>\n Irini Papadimitriou<\/strong>\u00a0is a curator and currently Creative Director at\u00a0FutureEverything<\/a>. She was previously Digital Programmes Manager at the V&A \u2013 where she initiated programmes such as the annual Digital Design Weekend festival and Digital Futures, and Head of New Media Arts Development at Watermans. Her display, Artificially Intelligent, was exhibited at the V&A in 2018 and in 2021 she curated\u00a0You and AI: Through the Algorithmic Lens<\/a>\u00a0for Onassis Foundation in Athens, followed by\u00a0Pl\u00e1smata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data<\/a>\u00a0in 2022. Her most recent exhibition,\u00a0Money, Ruins, and the Sea<\/a>\u00a0was presented at NeMe in Cyprus. Irini is a co-founder of Maker Assembly, a critical gathering about maker cultures, and she has been a co-curator for the Arts & Culture experience at Mozilla Festival, including the 2019 exhibition Trustworthy AI: Imagining Better Machine Decision Making. She is a recipient of curatorial research programmes including MOBIUS (Finnish Institute), Art Fund Jonathan Ruffer, Mondriaan Fonds and British Council and she has served as a jury member for Prix Ars Electronica, D&AD Awards, Lumen Prize, EU STARTS and ACM Siggraph.<\/p>\n"},{"event_header_information":{"event_date":"20230224","event_title":"Joanna Zylinska","time_from":"12:15 pm","time_to":"1:00 pm"},"event_short_text":" Joanna Zylinska<\/strong>, artist, writer and curator, Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King\u2019s College London. Moderated by Ele Carpenter, Director of UmArts.<\/p>\n Drawing on her philosophical work and her art practice, Joanna Zylinska will interrogate whether we can actively mobilise nonhuman creativity as a way of opening up our all too human ways of thinking and acting. She will also explore whether AI, rooted as it is in the extractivitst logic of the tech industry, can overcome its own material conditions of existence. Could AI play the role of a philosopher-visionary that will show us a way out of the current socio-political impasse? Could it get beyond the limitations of our human frames of mind to imagine a different set of propositions and arrangements? Could it help us envisage a better future?<\/p>\n Joanna Zylinska<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is an artist, writer, curator, and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King\u2019s College London. She is an author of a number of books, including\u00a0AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Open Humanities Press, 2020),\u00a0The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and\u00a0Nonhuman Photography<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(MIT Press, 2017). An advocate of \u201cradical open-access,\u201d she is an editor of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series for Open Humanities Press. Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while using machine learning to try and answer the question: \u201cDoes photography have a future?\u201d.<\/p>\n"}],"related_svp":"","related_wg":[{"ID":343,"post_author":"3","post_date":"2024-02-09 13:54:45","post_date_gmt":"2024-02-09 12:54:45","post_content":"\n UmArts is leading research in Art, Architecture, Design and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Ume\u00e5 University in partnership with the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program \u2013 Humanities and Society (WASP-HS) and Ume\u00e5 University\u2019s Centre for Transdisciplinary AI (TAIGA). In 2023, curator Sarah Cook joined UmArts as the WASP-HS Guest Professor in Art and AI in partnership with Bildmuseet, Ume\u00e5 School of Architecture (UMA), and Ume\u00e5 Institute of Design (UID).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Art and AI working is a group is chaired by Guest Professor Sarah Cook, and includes UmArts postdocs, mentors and artists in residence who are working with AI to share their research and develop new collaborative projects. The group considers how arts research can contribute to the social and ethical discourses of AI and machine learning, working in partnership with museums and galleries, artists and curators. The programme critically interrogates the aesthetics and politics of AI, collaborating with, and challenging the algorithmic logic underpinning hardware and software development. We are interested in how creative encounters can allow publics to experience and engage with the ethical considerations and societal shifts that widespread use of AI will bring and feeding that back into AI development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Octopus Club is open to all. It is a book club to close-read texts, artworks and films which investigate distributed intelligence and networked knowledge. Please email Emelie El-Habta<\/a> UmArts Research Co-ordinator you would like to join. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The next text is \u2018The Maniac\u2019 by Benjam\u00edn Labatut<\/a> about the life of John von Neumann nominated by Dimitri. This is contrasted with \u2018Klara and the Bomb\u2019 by artist Crystal Bennes,<\/a> about Klara von Neumann who was married to John, nominated by Ele. This comparison will provide an interesting insight into the history of computing and AI from biographical and feminist artistic perspectives. We will have a short discussion about the books with tea and biscuits after the working group meeting and find a date for a full discussion in March\/April. (Some of us are also reading Kazuo Ishiguro\u2019s \u2018Klara and the Sun\u2019 for the full trio of titles!) next meeting to be confirmed for March.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","post_title":"Art & Artificial Intelligence","post_excerpt":"UmArts is leading research in Art, Architecture, Design and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Ume\u00e5 University in partnership with the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program \u2013 Humanities and Society (WASP-HS) and Ume\u00e5 University\u2019s Centre for Transdisciplinary AI (TAIGA).","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"art-and-ai","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2025-04-07 15:45:04","post_modified_gmt":"2025-04-07 13:45:04","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/umarts\/?post_type=programme&p=343","menu_order":0,"post_type":"working_group","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"is_playback_available":false,"programme_date_times":"1 March 2024","label_for_repeating_events":"Online Talks:","programme_location":"online"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/umarts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/programme\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/umarts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/programme"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/umarts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/programme"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/umarts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/umarts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/umarts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/umarts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.romulusstudio.com\/umarts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/people?post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Octopus Club <\/h2>\n\n\n\n