Video: The New Real Reimagines Interactions Between Humans and Machines
Presenting The New Real Uncanny Machines Film and the winner of The New Real 2023 AI Art Commission at the second iteration of The New Real Salon
It was an eventful Friday night at the University of Edinburgh’s Inspace gallery, with the culminating event of the Edinburgh Futures Institute ‘Love Machine’ season: the New Real Salon on ‘The Algorithmic Turn’, gathering together The New Real community to explore how the new generation of powerful AI tools is opening unprecedented opportunities for human-machine creativity. Responding to EFI’s Love Machine theme, this New Real Salon brought into the light the relationship between the artist and AI technology, whilst at the same time the New Real’s research themes look to reimagine interactions between humans and machines, increase accessibility and interpretability for artists and foster transformative intelligent experiences for audiences.
The event kicked off with a screening of the Uncanny Machines film, showcasing the recipients of The New Real 2023 Development Awards – the finalists of the 2023 AI Art Commission – which allowed five artists to conduct research and development using The New Real’s Platform - an AI tool created with and for artists. Each artist tackled an urgent challenge of our times: giving voice to unheard voices in AI data; grappling with the implications of artificial superintelligence; sensing lost loved ones in small datasets; community-centred approaches to machine learning; and finding new metaphors to break open the 'black box' of AI.
Professor Drew Hemment, The New Real’s founder and principal investigator, spoke about the role of The New Real as ‘joining the dots’ in the AI art sector. With AI tools being limited in their accessibility and usability by artists, The New Real seeks to “push against these limits to support more profound artistic work…leading to new thinking and an unlocking of concepts and ideas”.
Phoenix Perry, activist and self proclaimed cultural engineer, interdisciplinary researcher and Senior Lecturer at Creative Computing Institute (CCI), gave a keynote on how AI joy can be unearthed by artists. Considering how our tools shape humans both in terms of how we act and how we think, Perry spoke of the importance of finding the joy in these tools. By developing capacity in a few key areas such as latent space access, glitch exploration, small and personal datasets, as well as easy-to-use AI tools, Perry’s vision for seeking and revelling in AI joy seems well within our grasp.
The keynote was followed swiftly with the much-anticipated announcement of the winner of The New Real 2023 AI Art Commission: UK and Netherlands-based Polish artist Kasia Molga.
Her project, titled ‘How to find the Soul of a Sailor’, will have her undertake a personal journey to find the soul of her father in data from a life spent on the seas. In her commission, Molga will draw on her experiments using The New Real's AI platform to recreate stories in his voice, having constructed a dataset from ships' logs, her dad's own diaries, and a British Library collection of maps from the Mediterranean Sea. Molga uses The New Real’s Word2vec feature to explore, among others, whether AI can convincingly recreate a way of writing such that aspects of her dad's personality can be 'sensed' and what are the implications and emotional effects of such a way of 'resurrecting' a person who is no longer with us.
Molga spoke about there being so much ‘what if’ when it comes to AI technology, so she
titles all her works ‘how to’ to focus less on the speculative and more on prompting us all to start finding answers. By walking the audience through some previous works and her story growing up on merchant navy ships with her father, she showed how and why her work is concerned with the environment – the ocean specifically – and themes of grief.
In conversation with Professor Hemment, Molga explained her interest in exploring the potential of small and personal datasets, as well as implications regarding the digital afterlife. Her commission seeks to understand what it means emotionally to build, interact with and explore these datasets. She spoke about the importance of the ethics and responsibility around data – where it is stored, what exactly it is made up of, how it is used. Speaking about the issues arising around using her late-father’s data, Molga said: “As an artist, I want to have a really nuanced dialogue about the subject [of the digital afterlife].”
Molga also spoke of the opportunity to work directly with those behind The New Real technology tools, and her excitement to see how artists and researchers can go on journeys together.
For the final section of the event – ahead of the canapes, drinks and chats – the audience were invited to ask questions of all the speakers, all moderated by Matjaz Vidmar, The New Real’s co-investigator, an interdisciplinary researcher, lecturer and strategist at the University of Edinburgh
On the topic of ‘control’ in artistic experimentation and exploration, Perry spoke about how she sees her work as “curating meaning” out of our experiences. This led to a wider discussion about how generative AI can help us think – what affordances it gives artists and the rest of us. The panel explained how AI is about associations and relationships – this being unique to AI versus ‘regular’ algorithms. The concept of ‘exploring relationships’ seems apt given Kasia’s project and the EFI theme of ‘Love Machines’.
This led to a fascinating discussion which led to some intriguing ideas: Kasia’s project seeks to find the ‘soul’ – perhaps this is the ‘latent space’ with respect to humans? Perhaps this can be a bid to explore joy in AI as per Perry’s call? And in turn, perhaps AI can help explore the bits of ourselves that we cannot understand and grasp using ‘conventional’ means? It was suggested that perhaps this will be the power of Kasia’s ‘love machine’ – whatever form it ultimately takes – that it can be more than a search for one sailor’s soul, but an exploration into how souls might be found through partnerships between humans and machines.
This is part of the Uncanny Machines commission, in partnership between The New Real at University of Edinburgh, Scottish AI Alliance, Alan Turing Institute and British Library.