Artistic Responses to (Intelligent) Machines

Technology is often portrayed as an independent force, driving social and cultural change untethered from the people who created it. In today’s conversations about artificial intelligence, we hear this perspective in the warnings of how these technologies promise to change society (and the humans that happen to be part of it). The dynamics pointing in the other direction—how the particularities of being human shape the AI machinery—usually receive less attention.

We know that human fallibility is deeply encoded into any technology, but how do social beliefs and cultural representations shape AI development? Whose desires, fears and aspirations influence how societies relate to or talk about AI technology? How does social inequality leave its imprint on the tools we choose to build?

In this event, we ask how artistic practice can open up different ways of understanding ‘intelligent machines’ and where it can be used to reclaim technologies for more fundamentally human purposes. The conversation will be led by Melanie Frances and Leonie Rae Gasson, artistic directors of the XR theatre lab Produced Moon, and will feature Jake Elwes, artist, hacker, radical faerie, neuroqueer and researcher, Dr Alice C Helliwell, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London, and Sanjay Sharma, Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick.

The event is hosted by the Digital Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study and curated in collaboration with Produced Moon. It is kindly funded by the John Coffin Memorial Trust.

Speaker Bios:

Jake Elwes is an artist, hacker, radical faerie, neuroqueer and researcher living in London. Across projects that encompass moving-image installation, sound and performance, Jake’s work finds unusual ways of demystifying, mapping and subverting technology. Their work searches for poetry and narrative in the successes and failures of digital systems. Works include deepfake drag in The Zizi Project, glitching oppressive algorithms in Machine Learning Porn and reframing AI generated marsh birds back into nature in CUSP. They have been making art exploring the aesthetics and ethics of machine learning systems since the very first generative AI models in 2016. Jake’s work also calls for us to challenge who builds these systems and for what purpose, and whether we as artists and queers can reclaim these technologies to build our own digital utopias.

Alice C Helliwell is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Northeastern University London where she specialises in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, ethics, and aesthetics.She completed a PhD on the philosophy of AI art at the University of Kent and is an active associate member of the Aesthetics Research Centre at Kent. Alice’s research is focused on the philosophical implications of computational creativity and art made by artificial intelligence. Her research aims to answer questions such as: Can AI meet the requirements of creativity? Can AI have the requisite agency or mind to be creative or make art? What are the aesthetics of AI art? And what are the ethical implications of AI creativity? This philosophical work is grounded in concrete examples from computational creativity and machine intelligence research, and draws on work from philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and ethics.

Sanjay Sharma is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. His research involves studying technologies of race and racism from critical data justice, decolonial and abolitionist perspectives. Through that work, Sanjay conceives the sociotechnical production of race as an assemblage, and interrogate how materialist understandings of digital ecologies open new possibilities for rethinking and resisting the contemporary force of racism and whiteness. More broadly, his work aims to situate ethno-racial difference as critical to the formation of contemporary digital culture. Currently, Sanjay holds a BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) Fellowship and has research projects focused on social harms produced by the deployment of AI and automated decisions making systems.

Produced Moon are a creative XR theatre lab based in Glasgow. They create playful, unsettling and magical experiences with audiences at the centre. Produced Moon’s founders and artistic directors are digital artist and mathematician Melanie Frances and queer immersive theatre maker Leonie Rae Gasson. They work collaboratively together, and with other creatives, scientists, technologists and programmers to experiment, explore and develop projects using mixed reality and live performance. The foundation of their work is the time spent in their XR lab environment, experimenting and playing with emerging technologies. Their work includes sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and they have been commissioned by a range of organisations including the Tron Theatre and Platform.