Introducing The New Real: A Dialogue Between Art and AI
Bringing together artists and AI researchers, The New Real is a post-pandemic exploration of the fluid boundary between the physical and digital. By Drew Hemment.
A desire to expand artistic uses of AI and explain the interactions between AI and our day-to-day reality is at the core of The New Real. We are living through unprecedented times, beset by multiple crises. Following the coronavirus pandemic, we are more dependent on digital interfaces than ever before. As a consequence, our jobs, health and wellbeing, even our experiences of art and culture, are increasingly bound up with emerging data technologies. This is our ‘new real’, the new everyday.
The pandemic has hurled into the mainstream the concerns and interests digital artists have been working on for decades. Suddenly, the way our lives are entangled with technology, and our own ability to influence this, is a front and centre issue. It is no longer a fringe concern.
The artworks in The New Real are created by artists working with machine-learning data and algorithms as material. Data artists are adept at surfacing critical issues and scaffolding human understanding through the design of digital experiences.
The New Real project is also a chance to reflect on the future place of festivals in society, and to share the emerging practices we have seen as artists respond to the lockdown. The artworks help us make sense of the way our world has changed since Covid-19 struck.
To launch The New Real project, two online, interactive artworks have been commissioned: Mechanized Cacophonies by Anna Ridler and Caroline Sinders, and The Zizi Show by Jake Elwes. Each presents an astonishing artistic encounter for audiences, and also asks deep questions about our relationship with technology. The works are presented as a special ‘out of season’ Edinburgh International Festival event.
Escape to an artificial beach
In Mechanized Cacophonies, Ridler and Sinders present an immersive artwork inspired by their time during lockdown, which explores how interactions with nature are increasingly mediated by technology. The audience see and hear waves crashing on a beach – a ‘natural’ environment generated by AI. The joy of the work comes in immersing oneself within it at home, and taking an active role in bringing it to life across multiple digital devices.
During lockdown many of us have craved nature and the outdoors. Sinders and Ridler had to isolate just two days into a residency at Edinburgh Futures Institute. In the process they found new, distributed ways of working – and in Mechanized Cacophonies have crafted an experience of nature that is both nourishing and otherworldly.
The two artists, working remotely, each captured sounds and images from a variety of sources. They trained a computerised neural network to interpret the resulting dataset and then generate eerie and uncanny representations of nature.
Interactive cabaret
The Zizi Show, made by Jake Elwes in collaboration with a community of drag artists, is a joyful and vivacious online cabaret that pushes the limits of what can be imagined on a digital stage. It is hosted by Zizi, a drag act constructed using so-called 'deep-fake' technology that is capable of learning a variety of dance styles, looks and mannerisms by observing human performers.
In the interactive artwork, Elwes constructs and then deconstructs, a virtual cabaret show featuring dazzling performances of hit songs. Viewing the work, the audience is able to switch between acts and glimpse the technological scaffold during the transition from one identity to another. The artwork conjures up the Zizi character, but then makes visible the processes used in its construction. Our very human obsession with machines becoming more like us is challenged and ultimately allayed.
The Zizi Show is a joyful cabaret that dissects one of the dominant myths about AI – the notion that 'an AI' is a thing we might mistake for a person. The ‘AI drag artist’ Zizi – the doppelgänger of the human cabaret performers – is a conceit. Elwes plays with the hype of AI so he can bring it crashing down.
The making of The Zizi Show has enabled the drag community – which during lockdown has lost access to safe spaces for creative expression – to come together in a variety of ‘spaces’, from a cabaret theatre to a secure server. For the artists and production team it has also been a learning curve on IP and music ‘sync rights’ in the digital space.
Artists and AI Research
It is, following the pandemic, all the more urgent to understand the way that technology reflects and shapes our social reality. We all need to recognise how systems make use of our data, the ways truth and experience are constructed online, the exclusions that are created, and the ways value circulates.
These two art experiences are have been created as a part of a journey the artists are traveling on together with researchers at Edinburgh Futures Institute. Over the past 18 months we have been collaborating with Ridler, Sinders and Elwes as part of our Experiential AI research theme, which seeks to explore and promote ethical and responsible AI – in part through commissioning art that engages with AI technology in meaningful ways.
While the two artworks are part of that journey, they are not its destination. For Ridler and Sinders, Mechanized Cacophonies is the first chapter in a wider body of work; both artists share an interest in making machine-learning datasets as a part of their artistic practice. In their wider collaboration, they want their art to make explicit and tangible the hidden human labour and environmental cost in AI. For Elwes, the journey with Zizi began with Zizi: Queering the Dataset. This first step was commissioned by Edinburgh Futures Institute for the ‘Preternatural’ 1 exhibition in August 2019.
When the pandemic struck, we like many had to do a pivot and recalibrate. We hope The New Real can make some small contribution to enrich the conversation about our new reality, and our collective agency to survive and thrive in this moment of crisis.
1. 'Preternatural - An exhibition of works by Jake Elwes', Inspace City Screen, Edinburgh, 2–26 August 2019, curated by Drew Hemment for Edinburgh Futures Institute
