[Webinar] Art, AI and Everything Else

Share

For over two decades, Art Center Nabi in Seoul has been committed to exploring the role of the arts and new technologies to gain new insight in human possibilities and addressing social problems. Nabi has invited artists to develop projects that use technology to overcome social divisions, counter to racial violence, debunk stereotypes, as well as nurture emotional connectedness, cultural engagement, political participation. In general, it has promoted the role of the arts in enhancing social solidarity and operated on the assumption that it can improve the quality of life.

In celebration of two decades of practice Nabi will host a series of web-based seminars.

3 web-based symposia spread over 3 days 3 – 5 December 2020

More info and registration link: http://www.nabi.or.kr/en/page/board_view.php?brd_idx=1084&brd_id=project


Session 1.
Art, Technology and the Cosmos
3 Dec 2020 (Thu) 18:00 ~ 19:30 (KST) / 10:00 ~ 11:30 (CET)

A pan-demic is a good time to evoke the pan-demos. Mobility has become a central feature of contemporary society. Art has been used as an advocate for flow, interaction and exchange, as well as a way of opposing disruption, exploitation and inequality. In this first seminar we throw open the scale of enquiry and experimentation. Art is a technology, and Cosmos is the space-time of everything. However, an ancient definition of cosmos refers to the activity of making a space-time attractive for the Other. The recent developments in contemporary art have been directed towards removing political boundaries and enhancing sociality. When schedules, plans, and models for organizing our ‘liquid life’ are on pause, space-time becomes an object of anxiety. This first session will be surveying the history of technology and how it brings us to the point that we find ourselves. We will zoom out to the widest questions and zoom in to specific examples from recent contemporary practices in art and technology. We will explore the possibilities for critique, and the possibility for art to stimulate sociality and solidarity in an era of masks and the fear of contagion that too easily becomes fear of community. How will artists conduct face-to-face encounters and operate skin-to-skin exchanges? Is a virtual public sphere and life on Zoom enough?


Session 2.
The poverty of philosophy after AI
4 Dec 2020 (Fri) 18:00 ~ 19:30 (KST) / 10:00 ~ 11:30 (CET)

In 2008 Chris Anderson declared that the data deluge had brought about the end of theory. The speed of computation had not only marginalised but eliminated a model of thinking that involved qualitative evaluation. How do we reimagine the role of thinking in action? Is there action without thinking? Has thinking been superseded by technologies of capture, storage and processing? AI and algorithms have been internalised as a normal feature of everyday life. Their banality eludes our attention while summoning deep anxieties. Do we have a vocabulary and conceptual understanding that can keep pace with this change? In this seminar we explore the disjunction between technological advances, modes of thought and models of governance. We question the belatedness of philosophy’s grasp on technology and the consequences of the differential speeds, places and temporalities where technology, thought and politics operate.


Session 3.
Humanizing the Machine/ Mechanizing the Human
5 Dec 2020 (Sat) 14:00 ~ 15:30 (KST) / 06:00 ~ 07:30 (CET)

Tools have always been part of how we define human ‘nature’. Our everyday use can make them feel like parts of our bodies. In habitual use there is constant feedback between us and them. With time and use the border between body and tool dissolves. Now tools also appear as models, but all models, for good or ill, fail us. The dominant understanding of AI flips between two models: either we maintain mastery over the tool, or the technology acquires sufficient agency to consume its master. This seminar goes beyond this dominant paradigm to consider a more fundamental question: what is the intelligence in technology? How do we align our social values and human desires with the dynamism of tools that also remake ‘us’ in the process of using them? If we go beyond the dichotomy between AI as engine of utopia and AI as corporate and exploitative logic, can we also imagine a form of AI that has no utility, one that is not designed according to a service function? Would this perspective allow us to consider ecological modes of intelligence not confined to the human mind, but distributed across and constituted by urban, natural and technological environments?

 

Leave a Reply


Related Articles

Artificial Intelligence and Archives
The Municipal Archive of Girona organized a Seminar within the framework of the Faber-Llull Residency (Olot, Catalonia) and the project InterPARES Trust AI of the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), and with the collaboration of the Society of Catalan Archivists. “Artificial Intelligence and Archives” Thursday April 27 - From 10:00 h to 14:00 h (CEST)   Several international experts in their respective professional fields from Brazil, Canada, Catalonia, C...
Meet WEAVE Team: ThinkCode
ThinkCode is a start-up company which designs and develops custom intelligent solutions and high-end software products by adopting and applying cutting-edge technology in the area of Artificial Intelligence into real- word applications. Consisting of people with strong research and industrial background, ThinkCode provides AI-enabled services that span a great range of applications such as Image Annotation, Sentiment Analysis, and Metadata Enrichment. In addition, by implementing the groundbreak...
Watch the new video of the Saint George on a Bike project
Cultural heritage professionals aim to improve the way we understand paintings by generating descriptions of them. However, since millions of cultural objects have been created throughout history, completing such a task seems impossible, but only for humans. The goal of the Saint George on a Bike (SGoaB) project is to provide high-performance metadata enrichment capability by using High Performance Computing (HPC) resources in the cultural heritage domain. The project trains natural language ...
Back to Earth: interconnected research, interventions and activities
text by Caterina Sbrana. I proposed months ago to DIGITALMEETSCULTURE readers an article referring to a series of artistic initiatives at the Serpentine Galleries in London in which technology meets art, entitled "Arts Technologies at Serpentine Galleries". In Spring 2020, Serpentine and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii’s contemporary art platform, Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters launched a collaboration inviting three artists involved in the Serpentine’s Back to Ear...