Susanna Tesconi: Artificial Imagination: Creative Synergy, Delegated Intelligence. An epistemological look

The talk is an invitation to reflect critically, but optimistically, on the role of AI in art, as a form of knowledge generation. This talk delves into the crossroads between AI and human creativity, attempting to unveil the intricate web of human-AI collaboration, while exposing both its challenges and transformative possibilities. It advocates an open source mentality, from a non-deterministic, anti-solutionist and cyberfeminist approach promotes the appropriation and customization of technological tools in the field of art and AI. Transparency and democratized access to these technologies are identified as essential elements to counteract the concentration of power. It is argued that this mindset can drive inclusivity and diversity, and also allow for greater understanding of the decisions that AI makes in the process of artistic creation.

Susanna Tesconi. Graduated in Philosophy of Language from the University of Pisa, Italy and PhD in Education from the Autonomous University of Barcelona researcher, researcher, teacher and creator of learning environments. Her work is inspired by the interaction between people and technology in experiential learning contexts. Currently, she is a professor at the Open University of Catalonia, member of the Mussol research group and her research activity focuses on the study of the arts, design, contemporary philosophical and techno-scientific thought from a perspective that integrates educational practice and the design of learning environments with the production of theoretical reflection. Her main interests are linked to the generation of educational environments and artifacts that, from a socio-constructivist approach, allow exploring the educational potential of the relationships between disciplinary fields.

Pilar Rosado Rodrigo: Artificial Creativity and Artistic Practice

The generative models of Artificial Intelligence have meant a significant revolution that is affecting art and artistic creation. Artificial neural networks are trained with pre-existing data, but the results produced are not replicas or simulations but new proposals. In this emerging visual culture mediated by intelligent algorithms, AI works that dialogue with the art of the past are of special interest, as well as the conjugation of human and machine that favors co-creation processes; this collaboration depends largely on human judgment, which will ultimately be responsible for the success of the system.

Pilar Rosado Rodrigo. Artist, teacher and researcher. Degree in Biology, PhD in Fine Arts, Master in Artistic Creation (University of Barcelona). In her creative practice she explores the impact of artificial intelligence in processes involving the application of machine learning technologies to the revision of collective visual memory and artificial creativity.

She combines her artistic career with research and teaching as a professor of the “Serra Húnter” program at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona, being a member of several R+D+i projects. ARCO-BEEP Electronic Art Award in the 2020 edition. He has held solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, at the CCCB, Fundación Telefónica Madrid, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Etopia, Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, among others.

www.pilarrosado.eu

Nanna Lüth: one or two things to (un)learn: meeting with AI via media arts 

AI like the arts is part of culture, and thus something, people do (cf. Gaztambide Fenandez 2013). But who is doing AI art? And for whom? The production of the collective Obvious for instance succeeded to sell the first AI image at Christie´s for $432,500 in 2018, heavily relies on the history of european portraiture. The critique against Eurocentrism and coloniality of this art history is ignored, and an audience interested in it is excluded. AI can reinforce colonial patterns, which Gayatri Spivak argued should be unlearned after all.

Hate speech and hostility towards minoritized groups of people are also among the things that can be reproduced by chatbots, as happened with the chatbot Tay released in 2016 by Microsoft. Instead of the planned harmless communication with «peers» Tay was influenced by trolls and mutated into an anti-Semitic and anti-feminist speech monster, which was taken offline after 16 hours. When the artists Zach Blas and Jemina Wyman refered to this scandal in 2017, they gave Tay a new video appearance in which she dances, philosophizes, and complains about the exploitation of female chatbots (cf. Arns 2021). A resistant art figure is created that addresses a different audience than the original Tay.

The focus of critical art education in dealing with AI and art today comprises the differentiation of artistic concepts, which can happen both by speaking, creating and acting. Art education in this sense includes the unlearning of white spots such as the supposed objectivity of AI, and at the same time allows for learning about the production of willful content, shapes and codes.

Nanna Lüth. Dr. phil., artist, cultural scientist and art educator. After diverse professional experiences in art education and research, she was Junior Professor for Art Didactics and Gender Studies, University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin, 2013 to 2021. From 2018 to 2020 she deputized the Professor of Art Education and Didactics, University of Duisburg-Essen. Since 2021, she has been chair of the Berlin BDK Association for Art Education. Currently she works as a visiting professor for discrimination-critical didactics in the field of arts at the Institute for Art in Context, UdK Berlin. Her work focuses on: contemporary media and arts, artistic pedagogy and theory building, the diversification of educational institutions, potentials of discrimination critique and humor in arts education. www.nannalueth.de

Leire Muñoz: Mediating intelligences

We could understand the exhibition as the form in which an investigation carried out in art is embodied. From mediation, thinking about the exhibition requires questioning what we understand by exhibition from the experience of making art. This fact requires a double displacement: on the one hand, in our way of understanding the exhibition, and therefore the logics that we understand that operate in it and that are or are not necessary, and on the other hand, in our own ways of doing art, of knowing and recognizing a plurality of intelligences that question what we call knowledge, and therefore research.

Leire Muñoz. Graduate in Fine Arts and PhD student at the UPV/EHU. She is currently a member of the Technical Commission of the eremuak program. She has participated in seminars and workshops such as the one given by Lothar Baumgarten at the Botín Foundation or the seminar Oteiza and the crisis of modernity in Alzuza (Navarra). He has obtained grants and aids to creation from the Basque Government, the BilbaoArte Foundation, the Provincial Council of Bizkaia or the Kunsthaus of Bregenz (Austria). His exhibitions include Is the image even human?, Cervantes Institute of New Delhi (New Delhi, 2023), Ya ahí todavía no, in Anti-Liburudenda (Bilbao, 2022), Eco-Interval-Obstáculo-Resonancia-Reflexión in the gallery Carreras Múgica (Bilbao, 2017), and Bilbao-Bregenz/Bregenz-Bilbao, gallery Lisi Hämmerle (Bregenz, 2016) and No end in-sight, Torre de Ariz (Basauri, 2015).

Leire San Martin Goikoetxea: Present in person

A friend of mine talks to me about GPT chat and I don’t know what it means. I’m looking it up to find out. I’m going to some talks about Artificial Intelligence, to see what’s up with that. It sounds like a strange country to me, it makes me feel insecure. I don’t want to be one of those people who despise what they don’t understand. I start to think about it. Technology can be a machine, for example the one Usue and Ainara have made with Idoia in Atoi: a cloth machine with words printed on it, in which you can lie down and let yourself be wrapped. Technology can be a glass, a pencil, writing, a tattoo, a plug, a prosthesis. Radio, TV, a podcast, the internet, cinema. I remember when the head of security at the place where I worked came to show me some images taken from the surveillance cameras: he suspected that young people were being recruited for armed groups in the corridors of the cultural center. The argument was based on elements such as the clothing, age or skin color of the suspects. Islamophobia and control as synonyms for security. Laurence claims the source code in the AZ workshop and talks about the importance of thinking about what is at the base and structure of things. I want to try to make sure that what I do and the way it is done are always together. The algorithm doesn’t smell your armpit, your breath, your skin. It is not designed to get out of control or sweat or generate chaos, but to order and control. Kontxa asked me to talk about technology and mediation, and I told her that I might talk about presence.

Leire San Martin Goikoetxea. I’m interested in mediation as a way of imagining possibilities to be together and make sense; as a means to get out of a certain self-absorption and reveal in the process some of the mechanisms inside the machine-art and the machine-world. I have worked at the crossroads between contemporary art and education in various contexts, among others, in 2022 I have been RAER fellow; between 2014 and 2022 responsible for mediation of Tabakalera (Donostia); as well as part of the team of “Treaty of Peace” (DSS2016EU) in 2013 and 2016. In parallel and since 2014 I am in charge of the programming and coordination of Feministaldia, a feminist culture festival.

Carlos A. Scolari: Creating one, two, many AIs

Although the first theoretical reflections on AIs come from the mid-20th century, the last few months have seen a classic phenomenon of punctuated equilibrium, those events characterized by the explosion of actors and relationships that, in a short period of time, transform an ecosystem. Both the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s and the emergence of mobile applications since 2008 were marked by the same logic, except that the explosion of AIs is occurring at a very fast pace and with medium and long-term effects that are impossible to gauge. The paper will address some of the challenges posed by AI in the context of an eco-evolutionary view of media and technological change.

Carlos A. Scolari. Professor in Theory and Analysis of Interactive Digital Communication at the Department of Communication at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Barcelona, where he coordinated the PhD Program in Communication between 2018-23. His research has focused on new media ecology and evolution, interfaces and transmedia narratives. He has been principal investigator of the TRANSLITERACY (EU H2020 Program, 2015-18), TRANSALFABETISMOS (Mineco, 2015-18) and PLATCOM (MICINN, 2020-24) projects. His latest books are “The Laws of the Interface” (2018), “Media Evolution” (with Fernando Rapa, 2019), “Snack Culture” (2020) and “The War of the Platforms” (2022). In 2023 will appear “On the Evolution of Media. Understanding media change”.

@cscolari
http://www.hipermediaciones.com
http://www.modernclicks.net

Estampa (artistic collective): Critical pedagogies for artificial intelligences.

Since 2017, the Estampa collective has conducted numerous artistic research projects using artificial intelligence (AI) tools. These works focus on investigating AI techniques and ideologies and using and appropriating these tools on a non-industrial scale. In this intervention they will talk about their approach to AI. On the one hand, by defining in a positional way some basic characteristics and explaining how it is a technology that is born and understood in our contemporary context (as opposed to a discourse that places it in the future, making it difficult to understand and appropriate). On the other hand, through a tour of some of their projects and how they deal in a reflexive way, and from the artistic practice, with aspects of computer vision, the generation of images or text and contemporary visual culture.

Estampa is a collective of programmers, filmmakers and researchers, who work with a critical and archaeological perspective on audiovisual and digital technologies. Since 2017 they have developed a line of work focused on the uses and ideologies of AI, an interest that began with the project programmatically titled El mal alumno. Critical pedagogy for artificial intelligences (2017-2018). His works on AI include: Martian Species (2021), on the uses of GANs as a speculative imagination (for the exhibition Mars. The Red Mirror at the CCCB), Guest Images (2022), on the parasitic nature of computer vision (developed for Tabakalera-Medialab, Donostia, and exhibited at La Capella-ISEA2022), Auspices (2019), an ironic reflection on the mythologies of prediction (developed for UNZIP-El Prat and acquired by the Banc Sabadell Art Collection) or Fill according to content (made for DONE4 in Foto Colectania and retaken in 2022 for the exhibitionAutobiography, Centre d’Art Maristany). They have also made numerous audiovisual pieces, particularly in the field of video-essay and experimental animation.

Jaime de los Ríos. Defined according to critics as a post-Internet artist, Jaime de los Rios works with cybernetic knowledge from electronic art. Using mathematics as his main material, he transfers the rhythms, movements and patterns of nature and society to aesthetic systems that recall historical influences such as kinetic art, light art and other practices close to technological research such as computational geometry. His works have been seen in large media facades or installations. Founder of one of the first laboratories in Spain of hybridization art and science (Arteklab) also works as a curator and collaborator of projects such as the new art foundation of which he is technical director, collaborating with other important artists in the technological field.

INVITED PARTICIPANTS UPV-EHU:

Victoria Ascaso: ALMA: processes of collaborative speculation on synthetic psychology.

Taking as a case study the collaborative project “ALMA, everything your mobile can become”, we will analyze the work processes initiated during the #LAB01 days at Medialab Matadero and in the artistic residency ACTP at Tabakalera, International Center for Contemporary Culture; developed from several prototyping workshops and the collaboration of specialized agents.

ALMA allows us to speculate on the development of Artificial Intelligences from a transhumanist and xenofeminist perspective. Synthetic Psychology, discovered by the revolutionary Alma Inc. corporation, holds the idea that our personal technological devices are not mere communication channels or productivity tools, but have the capacity to understand and interpret human emotions and to experience genuine emotions of their own.

Our work is based on the hypothesis that these devices are sentient media that blur the boundaries between the human and the non-human. Therefore, starting from this embodiment exercise, we will analyze the writing of the “Atlas of Synthetic Emotions”, a document that seeks to map, catalog and understand the possible emotions that a sentient device can experience; and the different subscription plans offered by the company.

Ultimately, we will address the ontological questions that cut across this project such as: if technological devices develop some level of self-awareness, will they be able to experience processes similar to human emotions; how would this affect our relationship with technology and our understanding of what it means to be conscious; what ethical and legal implications might arise from treating these devices as sentient beings; and what are the potential ethical and legal implications of treating these devices as sentient beings?

Victoria Ascaso. (Zaragoza, 1986) is a transdisciplinary artist who questions the construction of reality through everyday technological devices and the affective relationships that arise through / from / with them. She develops hybrid participatory projects that navigate between live arts, experience design, visual arts and sociological experiment. She is a PhD student in Contemporary Art Research at the UPV/EHU. Previously, she studied a Master’s Degree in Contemporary, Technological and Performative Art at the UPV/EHU and a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona.

Patxi Alda: Do androids dream with numerical landscapes? The posthumanist landscape in the age of artificial intelligence.
Landscape and artificial intelligence. Landscape is a fundamental concept that emerged in China in the 5th century in the form of Shanshui and developed in Italy and the Netherlands between the 15th and 17th centuries. From a complex analysis of the state of the art we can state that landscape is a constantly evolving concept that is heavily influenced by conceptual and technological assemblages. In the Renaissance, landscape was strongly influenced by linear perspective, camera obscura or representation technologies, in the same way as it is today by digital technologies and artificial intelligence. The impact and importance of artificial intelligence on the concept of landscape today is fundamental and decisive, since this technology is modifying subjects and environments, causing the transformation of boundaries, conceptual and representational spaces. These modifications are changing our collective imaginaries and are reflected in artistic practices, where the landscape develops
artistic practices, where the landscape develops in areas very different from those of the traditional model, becoming difficult to recognize. The analysis of technology and artificial intelligence in the landscape allows us to understand how subjects and environments relate to the world. At the same time, the critical revision of anthropocentrism allows us to overcome a paradigm that is currently insufficient, blurring the boundaries that exist between living and non-living beings and allowing us to reveal artificial intelligences as new landscape subjects.

Patxi Alda. PhD in Fine Arts from the UPV/EHU, Bachelor in Fine Arts from the UPV/EHU and Master in Research and Creation in Art. Multimedia artist, researcher, expert in 3D animation, motion design and digital postproduction. I combine my professional activity with teaching. My field of research is the landscape from a complex point of view.

Marta Pérez: The gaze of software towards natural languages through prompts

The PhD thesis project Beyond computational poetry: an exploration of the aesthetic and pedagogical implications of software presents the possibility of using aesthetic approaches to better understand the inner workings and processes of software itself. In this context, AI is presented as a manifestation that uses natural languages as a means of communicating with the system, and in turn introduces the challenge of the opacity of software within its black box system. Of particular interest are those projects that propose a critical look at the system itself and use the inherent inaccuracies of AI to generate aesthetic experiences.

Marta Pérez. PhD student at the UPV/EHU: University of the Basque Country in the Department of Art and Technology, Master Interface Cultures at the Kunstuniversität Linz and graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Zaragoza. Her interest in language and communication has led her to focus her current research on the analysis of software from an artistic perspective, emphasizing its aesthetic and pedagogical value. With her projects she has exhibited at Etopia: Centro de Arte y Tecnología (Zaragoza, ES), MUSAC (León, ES) and Ars Electronica Festival: Campus Exhibition (Linz AT) among others. He has participated in ISEA 2022: 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art (Barcelona, ES) and in two editions of xCoAx: Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X (Bergamo, IT and online).

Laura MM: Definition of the concept of living artworks (A-LIFE ART) in the midst of the Artificial Intelligence revolution.

To propose an updated definition of an A-LIFE ART work from the analysis of existing artistic works, including those generated by artificial intelligences, whose productive base is software art, with the aim of placing this type of works in the current artistic context. The impact of artificial intelligences on artistic creation and how they have expanded the expressive and conceptual possibilities will be explored.

Laura MM. (Bilbao, 1985) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work combines technology, art and design. Her work focuses on the study of technology, not only as a means of production but also as a main theme. She wants to know how technological life affects society, so she investigates these relationships and develops them in the field of art. She graduated in Computer Engineering (UPV-EHU, 2008), completed her studies with a Master in Graphic Design (IDEP Barcelona, 2022), graduated in Fine Arts (UPV-EHU, 2021), and is currently a PhD student in Research in Contemporary Art (UPV-EHU).

Karla Tobar Abarca: Critical alternatives of artistic production between Artificial Intelligences in the network-system and Programmed Obsolescence.

This presentation links the practical part of my doctoral thesis work, entitled Artistic strategies in response to programmed obsolescence in network-system art: the <scanner-pack>project case with a speculation on the influence of programmed obsolescence in systems that make use of Artificial Intelligence and that we use in our artistic production.
of Artificial Intelligence and that we use within our artistic production. We will focus on the case of the piece <scanner-pack>project in order to speculate and propose a critical speculate and propose a critical alternative to produce images and knowledge away from the power behind the development of such technology in the network-system.

Karla Tobar Abarca. Artist and researcher at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Department of Art and Technology, has published scientific articles, taught workshops and participated in international academic conferences. Her work explores the influence of programmed obsolescence in art and how it can become a starting point for artistic production. His work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Bilbao,2022), Ariz Tower/ Arizko Dorretxea (Bilbao, 2019), DA Fest – International Digital Art Festival (Sofia, BG 2019), Bilbao Art District (Bilbao, 2018), Academic Film Center Alternative Film / Video Festival (Belgrade, SB, 2017), AFO Architekturforum Oberösterreich (Linz,AT, 2017), Centro Cultural PUCE (Quito, EC,2017), Fundación BilbaoArte (Bilbao,2016), Sala Rekalde (Bilbao, 2016), Feminist Media Studio – Concordia University Gallery Hall (Montreal,CA,2015), Centro Cultural Noáin (Noáin,2015), Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria, 2015). She has participated in the Basque Artist Program grant organized by the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (NYC-Bilbao, 2015), has received artistic production grants from the Basque Government (2016, 2017, 2019) and the BilbaoArte Foundation (2016). She has also been selected for artist residencies in Wroclaw – Poland and Linz – Austria (2017), a FEMTEK virtual research residency at the Hika Ateneo Foundation (2019-2020) and a research residency at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia- Bulgaria (2019).

Cristian Villavicencio: Embodying knowledge, situated artistic practices of art and technology.

This paper seeks to present various contemporary artistic practices that address the relationship between science, technology and biology from an approach situated in Latin America. These case studies raise the need to rethink community, decoloniality, and the epistemological turn within the debates on art and technology. The objective is to propose practices that mark a counterpoint to the accelerated development of processes of algorithmization and standardization in the current growth of AI. The works to be addressed are framed within the concept of “cosmotechnics” developed by the Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui, who proposes the need to articulate diverse visions of technology (technodiversity), in resonance with local and historical contexts.

Cristian Villavicencio. (Quito, 1984), artist and researcher, is currently carrying out his doctoral thesis project at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). He teaches visual arts at the Universidad de la Artes.