The Mechanical Turkness: Tactical Media Art and the Critique of Corporate AI

The extensive industrialization of artificial intelligence (AI) since the mid-2010s has increasingly motivated artists to address its economic and sociopolitical consequences. In this chapter, I discuss interrelated art practices that thematize creative agency, crowdsourced labor, and delegated artmaking to reveal the social rootage of AI technologies and underline the productive human roles in their development. I focus on works whose poetic features indicate broader issues of contemporary AI-influenced science, technology, economy, and society. By exploring the conceptual, methodological, and ethical aspects of their effectiveness in disrupting the political regime of corporate AI, I identify several problems that affect their tactical impact and outline potential avenues for tackling the challenges and advancing the field.Comment: Matthes, J\"org, Damian Trilling, Ljubi\v{s}a Boji\'c and Simona \v{Z}iki\'c, eds. 2024. Navigating the Digital Age: An In-Depth Exploration into the Intersection of Modern Technologies and Societal Transformation. Vienna and Belgrade: Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory and University of Belgrade and Department of Communication, University of Vienn

ESSYS* Sharing #UC: An Emotion-driven Audiovisual Installation

We present ESSYS* Sharing #UC, an audiovisual installation artwork that reflects upon the emotional context related to the university and the city of Coimbra, based on the data shared about them on Twitter. The installation was presented in an urban art gallery of C\'irculo de Artes Pl\'asticas de Coimbra during the summer and autumn of 2021. In the installation space, one may see a collection of typographic posters displaying the tweets and listening to an ever-changing ambient sound. The present audiovisuals are created by an autonomous computational creative approach, which employs a neural classifier to recognize the emotional context of a tweet and uses this resulting data as feedstock for the audiovisual generation. The installation's space is designed to promote an approach and blend between the online and physical perceptions of the same location. We applied multiple experiments with the proposed approach to evaluate the capability and performance. Also, we conduct interview-based evaluation sessions to understand how the installation elements, especially poster designs, are experienced by people regarding diversity, expressiveness and possible employment in other commercial and social scenarios.Comment: Paper to be published in 2022 IEEE VIS Arts Program (VISAP 2022). For the associated supplementary materials, see https://cdv.dei.uc.pt/essys_sharing_uc

Anatomical Intelligence: Live coding as performative dissection

This article describes the method of ‘dissective’ live coding, as developed through the artistic-research project Anatomies of Intelligence. In this work we investigate how live coding can be used as an approach for performative explorations of a data corpus and a machine learning algorithm operating on this corpus. The artistic framework of this project collides early Enlightenment-era anatomical epistemologies with contemporary machine learning, creating a fertile space for novel, embodied artistic methods to emerge. We engage audiences in an immersive, live-coded experience where image and sound are driven by our dissective approach, revealing the underlying rhythms and structures of a machine learning algorithm running live on an artist-made dataset. To support these performances we have developed a custom browser-based software, the Networked Theatre, used for both hybrid in-person/online audiovisual performances. In this article we describe this work and reflect on our experience as performers and audience feedback, which suggests that our dissective method of live coding, based on examining ‘ready-made’ algorithms, offers a unique experiential entryway into the bodies of machine learning and data corpi

Machine Learning Processes as Sources of Ambiguity: Insights from AI Art

Ongoing efforts to turn Machine Learning (ML) into a design material have encountered limited success. This paper examines the burgeoning area of AI art to understand how artists incorporate ML in their creative work. Drawing upon related HCI theories, we investigate how artists create ambiguity by analyzing nine AI artworks that use computer vision and image synthesis. Our analysis shows that, in addition to the established types of ambiguity, artists worked closely with the ML process (dataset curation, model training, and application) and developed various techniques to evoke the ambiguity of processes. Our finding indicates that the current conceptualization of ML as a design material needs to reframe the ML process as design elements, instead of technical details. Finally, this paper offers reflections on commonly held assumptions in HCI about ML uncertainty, dependability, and explainability, and advocates to supplement the artifact-centered design perspective of ML with a process-centered one

Active Divergence with Generative Deep Learning - A Survey and Taxonomy

Generative deep learning systems offer powerful tools for artefact generation, given their ability to model distributions of data and generate high-fidelity results. In the context of computational creativity, however, a major shortcoming is that they are unable to explicitly diverge from the training data in creative ways and are limited to fitting the target data distribution. To address these limitations, there have been a growing number of approaches for optimising, hacking and rewriting these models in order to actively diverge from the training data. We present a taxonomy and comprehensive survey of the state of the art of active divergence techniques, highlighting the potential for computational creativity researchers to advance these methods and use deep generative models in truly creative systems

Technology-based Mediation in the Art Museum

The purpose of public art museums is to collect and exhibit art to benefit society, but what if people are bored or outright intimidated by the prospect of having to visit the art museum? Art challenges us to see it if we can, but we cannot always do so. Art museums do their best to provide interpretive hooks for visitors. In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), researchers have attempted to support these efforts as well. However, old museum paradigms linger, making the art museum a conceptually contested space.This also affects HCI projects carried out in art museums, as they have to avigate or circumvent these conceptual challenges. In this PhD project, I present a theoretical framework that incorporates an enactivist understanding of art as experience and the work of art mediation as education of attention. Using these concepts, I offer a visitor-centered view on the art museum experience, that gives researchers, designers, curators and mediators tools for understanding the role technology may play in an art museum exhibition and how to conceptualize, design and evaluate such designs.This perspective is illustrated and explored through three major research activities, of which the last two were in close collaboration with the MUNCH museum in Oslo. The activities involved an experiment, an exhibition and an interactive drawing table respectively, and each investigates aspects of how technology mediates our relation to artworks.With the results of these three activities, I argue that technological designs can support the interpretive practice of museum visitors by educating their attention to aspects of the art that they would otherwise fail to see or give weight to. Purposefully designed technology can afford experiences that engage the senses and the whole human in ways that are exciting for museum visitors, while still establishing context and stimulating curiosity in the original artworks. For each of the three research activities, I provide analysis of how the designs concretely mediate the relation between visitor and art. To be able to design for this, and to evaluate whether a design affords correspondence with the art in the intended way, I operationalize the concept of education of attention as a way to analyze qualitative interview data. Finally, I discuss particular mediating properties of generative AI in relation to its deployment in art museums.The purpose of public art museums is to collect and exhibit art to benefit society, butwhat if people are bored or outright intimidated by the prospect of having to visitthe art museum? Art challenges us to see it if we can, but we cannot always do so. Artmuseums do their best to provide interpretive hooks for visitors. In Human-ComputerInteraction (HCI), researchers have attempted to support these efforts as well. However, old museum paradigms linger, making the art museum a conceptually contested space. This also affects HCI projects carried out in art museums, as they haveto navigate or circumvent these conceptual challenges. In this PhD project, I presenta theoretical framework that incorporates an enactivist understanding of art as experience and the work of art mediation as education of attention. Using these concepts, Ioffer a visitor-centered view on the art museum experience, that gives researchers,designers, curators and mediators tools for understanding the role technology mayplay in an art museum exhibition and how to conceptualize, design and evaluate suchdesigns.This perspective is illustrated and explored through three major research activities, of which the last two were in close collaboration with the MUNCH museum inOslo. The activities involved an experiment, an exhibition and an interactive drawing table respectively, and each investigates aspects of how technology mediates ourrelation to artworks.With the results of these three activities, I argue that technological designs cansupport the interpretive practice of museum visitors by educating their attention to aspects of the art that they would otherwise fail to see or give weight to. Purposefullydesigned technology can afford experiences that engage the senses and the whole human in ways that are exciting for museum visitors, while still establishing context andstimulating curiosity in the original artworks. For each of the three research activities,I provide analysis of how the designs concretely mediate the relation between visitorand art. To be able to design for this, and to evaluate whether a design affords correspondence with the art in the intended way, I operationalize the concept of educationof attention as a way to analyze qualitative interview data. Finally, I discuss particularmediating properties of generative AI in relation to its deployment in art museums

EVA London 2022: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

The Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London 2022 Conference (EVA London 2022) is co-sponsored by the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, of which the CAS is a Specialist Group. Of course, this has been a difficult time for all conferences, with the Covid-19 pandemic. For the first time since 2019, the EVA London 2022 Conference is a physical conference. It is also an online conference, as it was in the previous two years. We continue with publishing the proceedings, both online, with open access via ScienceOpen, and also in our traditional printed form, for the second year in full colour. Over recent decades, the EVA London Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts has established itself as one of the United Kingdom’s most innovative and interdisciplinary conferences. It brings together a wide range of research domains to celebrate a diverse set of interests, with a specialised focus on visualisation. The long and short papers in this volume cover varied topics concerning the arts, visualisations, and IT, including 3D graphics, animation, artificial intelligence, creativity, culture, design, digital art, ethics, heritage, literature, museums, music, philosophy, politics, publishing, social media, and virtual reality, as well as other related interdisciplinary areas. The EVA London 2022 proceedings presents a wide spectrum of papers, demonstrations, Research Workshop contributions, other workshops, and for the seventh year, the EVA London Symposium, in the form of an opening morning session, with three invited contributors. The conference includes a number of other associated evening events including ones organised by the Computer Arts Society, Art in Flux, and EVA International. As in previous years, there are Research Workshop contributions in this volume, aimed at encouraging participation by postgraduate students and early-career artists, accepted either through the peer-review process or directly by the Research Workshop chair. The Research Workshop contributors are offered bursaries to aid participation. In particular, EVA London liaises with Art in Flux, a London-based group of digital artists. The EVA London 2022 proceedings includes long papers and short “poster” papers from international researchers inside and outside academia, from graduate artists, PhD students, industry professionals, established scholars, and senior researchers, who value EVA London for its interdisciplinary community. The conference also features keynote talks. A special feature this year is support for Ukrainian culture after its invasion earlier in the year. This publication has resulted from a selective peer review process, fitting as many excellent submissions as possible into the proceedings. This year, submission numbers were lower than previous years, mostly likely due to the pandemic and a new requirement to submit drafts of long papers for review as well as abstracts. It is still pleasing to have so many good proposals from which to select the papers that have been included. EVA London is part of a larger network of EVA international conferences. EVA events have been held in Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, California, Cambridge (both UK and USA), Canberra, Copenhagen, Dallas, Delhi, Edinburgh, Florence, Gifu (Japan), Glasgow, Harvard, Jerusalem, Kiev, Laval, London, Madrid, Montreal, Moscow, New York, Paris, Prague, St Petersburg, Thessaloniki, and Warsaw. Further venues for EVA conferences are very much encouraged by the EVA community. As noted earlier, this volume is a record of accepted submissions to EVA London 2022. Associated online presentations are in general recorded and made available online after the conference

Towards an Internet of Glass Things: Glass Artworks as Digitally Communicating Objects

The research explores the combination of digital technologies with glass art to generate interactivity, animacy and playful experiences. From the mid-nineties artists and designers started blending digital technology with crafted artefacts to enable interaction between artwork and audience, at times mediated through the Internet. The last two decades saw the development of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), web-connected devices that are environment-sensing and communicate with each other independently of users. The contextual survey revealed that to date there are few projects or papers exploring the potential of integrating glass as an artistic medium with interactive digital media. My aim was to use a multiple-methods practice-based methodology to investigate the creative possibilities of incorporating digital interactivity in glass art. A series of artworks selected from my recent practice using physical computing for digital interactions are described, demonstrating methods and narratives that expand possibilities for storytelling. The thesis investigates how novel interactive technologies embedded in glass may engage viewers and communicate content. A number of ways that glass lends itself to blending with computational materials were explored. Investigation into embedding conductive traces in glass by adapting glass-making processes to create circuitry for smart interfaces was undertaken. Blending IoT technology with glass enables connectivity between artwork and audience offering the potential for telepresence. Research carried out during the COVID-19 global pandemic explored networked working methods and also applied research into the effects of COVID lockdowns on touch in the generation of digitally-augmented artworks. Projects in this study contribute to the expansion of the contemporary glass field in the 21st Century. Combining glass and digital technologies including IoT offers potential for expression and expansion of artistic ideas. These are articulated for practitioners working with glass, curators, academics and designers interested in embedded computer systems. An ‘Internet of Glass Things’ is proposed as a term to describe interactive glass artworks