Uncanny Machines: Drew Hemment introduces the theme of The New Real 2023 Art Commission

Image Credit: The New Real and Queering the Dataset, by Jake Elwes

Uncanny Machines: A funded opportunity to create a new AI Art work and explore the uncanny interplay of humans and machines

As a new generation of powerful AI tools open unprecedented opportunities for artistic creation, and are entering what some call a "golden age for AI art". While wary of hype cycles, this is a moment many artists are exploring the implications for their own practice, and voicing their perspectives on the profound upheavals that these developments bring.

With new capabilities, come challenges. The outputs of the new generation of tools, such as recently released text-to-image generators, appear like magic, with little scope for human intervention or creative control. The complex algorithms are black boxed, not accessible to human understanding. There are issues around authorship, consent, fair pay, energy use, harmful bias, and misinformation. With the release of ever more powerful creative AI tools, these are increasingly mainstream opportunities and concerns.

At a time of upheaval, artists are at the forefront, helping to illuminate the ways emerging technology impacts on life at a profound level. Artists expose and explore the sublime, the indefinable, what we cant put into words. The outputs of the statistical lens of AI are often uncanny and preternatural, beyond what is normal or natural. Artists are pushing at the boundaries of human-machine creativity to generate works that combine machine learning methods with human intuition and embodied experience and discover features that are not in the data. Recently we have seen the artist community look beyond fears of so-called 'singularity' towards joyful and celebratory ways for all forms of living intelligence to flourish on a thriving planet.

In The New Real, we believe in opening up technology and data for open exploration and discovery, and in connecting science and data to applications and impacts in the real world. Our idea is to provide artists accessible tools to directly manipulate a model, in order to enable profound artistic experiments with AI. We believe this can lead to better art, and also provides a basis to probe and question urgent issues of today. 

For this commission, we are looking for an artist interested to reimagine and reshape the interface and interactions between humans and machines. We are interested in transformative experiences for audiences fuelled by AI, and works that address key challenges in AI, such as authorship, harmful bias or misinformation. 

Send us an early stage project concept, and your ideas for a talk, to address the Uncanny Machines theme, and explore both how artists can push creative boundaries with AI, and how AI can be enriched or challenged by the Arts. You will be able to use our machine learning platform, it’s Word2vec feature, and custom tools to probe, explore and generate textual data relating to your theme. This is specifically an opportunity for you to explore how you can develop profound new works when you have more granular control over an AI tool and can use it to probe and fine tune a model. We invite you to experiment with our platform and data to investigate the entanglements of people, data, machines and environments and to develop multi-sensory exploration of possible futures.

The New Real announces a new AI Art commissioning opportunity (£20,000 total).

A funded opportunity for an established creative practitioner (or practitioners) to work with The New Real's cross-disciplinary team, AI tools and textual data to develop a new AI Art work for presentation with a festival/venue/presentation partner in 2023, that probes the uncanny interplay of humans and machines, and illuminates the social implications of recent developments in AI.

The commission will take place across 2023 beginning in February, presenting concepts and/or work in progress at events in March (Stage 1) and May (Stage 2), and culminating in the launch of the work produced in Edinburgh in Summer/Autumn 2023. 

The New Real 2023 AI Art Commission: Uncanny Machines

Total value £20,000:

5 x £1,000 development awards

1 x £15,000 full commission.

Expressions of Interest Deadline:

5pm, 23rd January 2023

Artists' Information Session: 

4pm, 11th January 2023

The New Real 2023 AI Art Commission is a partnership between The New Real at University of Edinburgh, Scottish AI Alliance, Alan Turing Institute and British Library.

Links and further reading:

You can read fulls details of the New Real 2023 Art Commission here

Listen to our New Real 2023 Commission #AI & #ART 🎙️PODCAST here

Read blog by Matjaz Vidmar (The New Real) & Steph Wright (Scottish AI Alliance), sharing insights into this partnership to launch this new AI Art Commission here