AI

'Een hele echte' is a story told through emails that readers receive in the course of 14 days. In the story, Helen is looking online for a new bass gitar. She stumbles upon Tarak, who is not a real person, but an artificial intelligence entity. Helen experiences the enormous influence of her live on the internet, which is completely taken over by Tarak. 

Lucebot is an artificial intelligence poetry bot that produces live poetry based on the rhythm of poems of the poet Lucebert. The birth of Lucebot was announced in 'Kijkschrift,' which is an artistic and literary pop-up magazine.

In a 1980 interview with David Remnick, John Ashbery describes the formative impact that the poetry of W. H. Auden had on his writing: “I am usually linked to Wallace Stevens, but it seems to me Auden played a greater role. He was the first modern poet I was able to read with pleasure…” In another interview Ashbery identifies Auden as “one of the writers who most formed my language as a poet.” For Auden’s part there was a mutual yet mysterious appreciation for the younger poet’s work; Auden awarded Ashbery the Younger Yale Poets prize for his collection “Some Trees”, with the caveat: “...that he had not understood a word of it.”

This web based exhibition presents a creative experiment using OpenAI’s GPT-2 and traditional recurrent neural networks to develop a generative poetry pipeline loosely modeled after this short narrative describing the dynamic between Ashbery, Auden, and Stevens. While this modeling is subjective and playful it aims to map the relationships between the three poets appropriately into different aspects of a machine learning framework. By exploring the potential of using social and personal relationships and the narratives they imply as inspirational structure for designing generative text pipelines and creating “Transformative Reading Interfaces” that explicate the relationships between the training corpora, the machine generated text, and the conceptualization of the artist.

“I live on Earth at the present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing –a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process– an integral function of the universe.”

– Buckminster Fuller, from I Seem to be a Verb, 1970

‘Bucky’ Fuller’s well-known quote, originally published in his book I seem to be a verb, (1970) contrasts human participation in the material world (which Fuller suggests can be described with nouns) and the ongoing evolutionary processes which influence and shape that world (which Fuller suggests can be described with verbs).

The web-based "A.I. seems to be a verb" (2021), automatically identifies and maps speech, not only as linguistic functions (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc.) but also across a spectrum of sentiment from negative to positive, in order to generate a complex array of paratextual supports (typeface, page-design, rules and symbolic elements and word-prompts) used in the visual representation of the text to the screen. The entire process happens in real-time, providing an uncanny ‘mise-en-abyme’ experience which contemporaneously engages the participant’s auditory and visual responses to language construction.

Distant Affinities is a work of recombinant cinema about machine intelligence attempting to process, narrate and mimic sentient being. Through subtitles, the omniscient AI narrator cycles through media that has been captured from the network and attempts a narrative interpretation of the patterns of human behavior. Disparate data points and discontinuous video loops resist being systematized or narrativized. The distances or gaps between the text and video fragments suggest what remains outside the domains of surveillance and narrative. An allegory of the vagaries of networked life existing within larger webs of living and non-living systems, the work shows a world coming apart, but also transforming into a more spacious mode of being made of errant language, creaturely life, isolated gestures and mutating interfaces.

Distant Affinities is programmed to oscillate between a probabilistic distribution of media elements and controlled narrative sequencing; between poetic montage and spatio-temporal continuity. Video, audio and text fragments appear on the screen in semi-indeterminate arrangements, depicting the chaotic flux of a technological world endlessly changing and repeating itself with each user click. Clicking on certain fragments “zooms in” voyeuristically on moments of individual lives, full of their own complex cycles of sensation, memory, thought, embodied and disembodied living. Loops, nested and at various scales, are employed to convey a fractal temporality. The intention of the work is to create an ambient and fluid experience, at times adrift in indeterminate structures and processes and at other times stimulating in the viewer a search for meaningful patterns.

In “Flight of the CodeMonkeys,” you play a servile programmer who must correct code for a tyrannical AI.  In this futuristic dystopia, the AI System has control over everything — everything, that is, except its own code. To make necessary corrections or changes to its code, it needs an army of codemonkeys following its directions to the last bit.  However, as you sweat, attending to its many requests, you begin to wonder if the code you are correcting is all that benign.  When you are contacted by the Resistance, an anonymous faction poised against the System, your suspicions grow.  On the other hand, all you really want is to finish your code work so you can start your vacation with your romantic interest: marta. With each coding error you make, your vacation moves further and further away. It has been said that code holds deep meaning for its readers. This code is as meaningful as it gets, for it holds the fate of its protagonist codemonkey.In this interactive story, readers change the outcome by changing the very Python code upon which it runs, choosing whether to follow the dictates of the System (and more quickly reach a much-needed vacation) or to follow the instructions of the Resistance and attempt to bring down the System.

“Flight of the CodeMonkeys” runs on Google’s Colaboratory, which is an instantiation of Jupyter Notebooks. The code of the story is “live,” meaning it can be compiled and run. You can also download the Jupyter Notebook to run it locally. Though no programming background is required to read the story, a little literacy might just mean the difference between a life of mindless servitude and making the world anew.

(Source: Author's description on The New River)

Our artistic research led us to amass an archive of thousands of recorded worries from people in the US and abroad. Ecology of Worries asks the question of whether we should teach a machine to worry for us. The animation consists of hand drawn critters. Some critters are driven by synthetic worries generated with TextGenRnn recurrent neural network trained on the transcribed worries archive. Other characters are driven to worry by a novel machine learning system called Generative Pretrained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), which was dubbed by some commentators as the AI that was too dangerous to release (but it was released anyway). The creatures’ performance of synthetic worries spans a gradient of intelligibility, reflecting on our deeper collective reality.By characterizing the synthetic worries of various sophistication as variously evolved creatures we aim to engage the empathy of the viewers. It is one thing to experience a text generating neural network failing into mode collapse, which is a state where the system generates the same unchanging output no matter the input (e.g. a string of the same repeating vowel over and over again). It is a whole other thing to watch a mode collapse personified by one of these critters: as we watch the creature struggling to get a word out we can’t stop ourselves from feeling like we should help it finish the sentence. The mode collapse text result of ‘aaa aaaaaaa’ becomes a living wail. The critters in Ecology of Worries appear sentient not because of omniscience a tech evangelist might expect from a digital assistant, but due to their very real flaws. The creatures become uncanny through a juxtaposition of familiar and abstract concerns. The work invites people to watch, listen, and engage with these cute and disturbing beings to make shared concerns—whether serious or hilarious—intimate.

The Singularity is a web-based AI narrative system that demonstrates the ethical issues, hidden biases and misbehavior of emerging technologies such as machine learning, face tracking and big data. The system tracks users' eye positions through a webcam, and continuously feeds users directly into their eyes with infinite Reddit posts containing the latest progress in AI along with random news and ads. By visualizing eye trajectories over time, it suggests possible misuses and dangers of all-pervasive data tracking. The near-invisible operations underpinning the technologies could bring visible and fundamental changes to the society, leading the world to a "technological singularity" in which technology governs all aspects of human society. This work consists of three sub-systems: 

1. Infinite news feed system: The system continually scrapes article titles of latest posts about artificial intelligence and technological singularity from subreddit r/singularity (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/ and r/artificial (https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/). The seemingly uni-directional information flow of news feed is actually bi-directional - user activities are fed back to the machine like in an echo room. Two parallel streams of texts on the screen marks the co-evolution of users and machine systems driven by day-to-day browsing activities.
2. Face-tracking surveillance system: Real-time face tracking algorithm is implemented with ml5js (https://ml5js.org/), a machine learning library that runs in the browser. The face position and the degree that the face turns from the webcam are tracked. The direction of floating sentences always points towards users' eyes. When the user looks away by turning the head, the texts will twist and wiggle as if responding to and disobeying user movement. Such suspicious interaction signifies the disobedience of machines and behavior manipulation by malicious algorithms.
3. Data collection and replay system: User's face movement is also recorded, reshaped and replayed by the system. The trajectory of user interaction is visually represented by intertwining curves drawn on top of the texts. When user is absent from the webcam, the visual artifacts become fully visible and reveal those data that have been secretly collected in the background, arousing concerns of user privacy violation in insecure web systems.

Source: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/Wang/wang.h…