NEoN Digital Arts Archive
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ALGORITHMIC ENCOUNTERS / MACHINIC PERCEPTIONS
Siri Black, Marion Carré, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sarah Cook.
Friday 12 November, 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Artists Siri Black and Marion Carré in conversation with artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and curator Sarah Cook.
Considering machine learning systems and real-world experiences, artists Siri Black and Marion Carré have presented on their art works developed during their 'New Forms of Togetherness' online residencies. The artists were joined in the discussion by artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and curator Sarah Cook.
Between November 2020 and December 2021, artists Siri Black and Marion Carré have been developing work exploring the interdisciplinary and increasingly relevant field of machine learning and creative practice. The works that have emerged include the application of machine learning methods and engage with themes of authenticity and judgment of both human and artificial perception.
Marion Carré has presented Selective Memories - online participative artwork establishing parallels between the construction of the archive and the construction of truth. Siri Black spoke about 'An index finger tracing a thought' - a film part of an ongoing research project focusing on the infamous face on Mars. As part of its 2021 festival, NEoN Digital Arts has hosted a discussion with the artists to present the outcomes of the residency in the lead-up to an exhibition in Glasgow in December 2021.
'New Forms of Togetherness' is a cultural collaboration between the Goethe-Institut Glasgow and the Alliance Française Glasgow (together with the Institut Français d’Ecosse) aiming at facilitating new approaches to Artificial Intelligence through the unity of technology and art. The remote residency has been delivered with support from partners the National Library of Scotland, the Social Brain in Action Lab, NEoN Digital Arts and the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has been increasingly working with machine learning and artificial intelligence systems, and how they might play out in the natural world, most recently in the creation of her commission for the Eden Project, Pollinator Pathmaker. A recorded conversation with Sarah Cook, released as part of the Programmable Nature series for the Digital Departures Lab at the University of Glasgow, is made available online, highlighting Ginsberg’s digital art projects that bring together nature and human-made systems.
About the participants
Marion Carré (France)
Marion Carré carries out several activities in parallel: entrepreneur, teacher, speaker, author and artist. All of these approaches allow her to explore the relationships between art and artificial intelligence from different angles. She started working on this subject when she co-founded Ask Mona in 2017. Ask Mona is a startup that mobilizes artificial intelligence to bring audiences and cultural institutions together and to help make culture more accessible.
Gradually, she led in parallel a more theoretical exploration of the subject which she shared through talks, teaching and a book entitled ‘Art and Artificial intelligence. Artist in the making?' published in March 2020. She also explores this art / artificial intelligence dialectic from the angle of creation. After learning how to code by herself, she added a new tool to her artistic practice: machine learning.
She believes that art is a formidable counterweight to artificial intelligence. She explores through her work the sum of subjectivities that make up our relationship to reality. As artificial intelligence encodes our knowledge by learning from it to reproduce our reasoning on a larger scale, it reveals our perception of the world around us.
Siri Black (Germany / Scotland)
Siri Black lives and works in Glasgow. Her work is the love child of anachronism and technophilia. Siri works across analogue and digital photography, film and sound to create installations that seek to trace instances of the couching of state power with technological prowess. Important is the detritus left in the wake of accelerated progress; the gaps in archives, the not so easily translate-able entanglements.
Siri's research is often conducted through collaborations with other art practitioners and scientists. With a keen focus on the means of image production and distribution, her moving image work often points to its own material process, thereby aiming to question the existence of an objective or lossless transmission of knowledge.
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Daisy’s work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, conservation, biodiversity, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the world.
Daisy has spent over ten years experimentally engaging with the field of synthetic biology, developing new roles for artists and designers. She is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014), and in 2017 completed Better, her PhD by practice, at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), interrogating how powerful dreams of “better” futures shape the things that get designed. She read architecture at the University of Cambridge, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and received her MA in Design Interactions from the RCA.
Sarah Cook is a curator of contemporary art. She is professor of Museum Studies in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is editor of 24/7: A Wake-up Call For Our Non-stop World (Somerset House, 2019) and INFORMATION (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2016) and co-author (with Beryl Graham) of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010; Chinese edition 2016). Sarah is one of the curators behind Scotland’s only digital arts festival NEoN Digital Arts and was founder/curator of LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery in the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. She recently curated 24/7 for Somerset House, London.