1,578 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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Duke University researchers develop a novel method of encrypting text, harnessing the chaos of computer simulated bacterial growth. Expanding on their recent article in data science journal Patterns , the team summarizes their use of machine learning frame-by-frame analysis of organic reaction–diffusion system animations to en- and decode text strings. “These patterns in essence constitutes a new, digitally generated coding scheme, which we call Emorfi,” they write .
“Our ambition must stretch beyond the timid idea of AI governance, which accepts a priori what we’re already being subjected to, and instead look to create a transformative technical practice that supports the common good.”
–
Resisting AI (2022) author Dan McQuillan, advocating for active resistance against a dawning age of “machine learning
redlining ”
“Entangled: bio/media” opens at Shanghai’s Chronus Art Center (CAC), exploring “the biophilic properties of artificial intelligence, electronics, algorithms, and informatics” in a group exhibition. Unveiled progressively in thematic chapters, eleven works by Ani Liu , Shuyi Cao , Etsuko Yakushimaru , Yunchul Kim , Xu Haomin (Rootless Tree , 2022), and others narrate a parable of “co-naturality” (see Eugene Thacker’s Biomedia ) and “all beings comingling and co-existing in symbiosis.”
In his ongoing pursuit of automating his artistic practice, Swedish artist Jonas Lund turned to AI to self-replicate into an army. Feeding a respective text prompt to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 , a sea of Lunds emerged, making art on laptops in signature blue shirts and hats. “Me and my 50+ clones working in the studio on the next master piece,” he writes on Twitter as concerns over AI-powered image generators impacting artists negatively become ever louder.
“It is understandable that people with no technical training might rely on metaphors to understand complex technology. But we would hope that policy-makers might develop a slightly more sophisticated understanding of AI than the one we get from Robocop .”
– Legal scholar
Tomas Fitzgerald , in an article detailing how bad metaphors (e.g. comparing neural networks to brains) hamper our attempts to understand AI
“Emmy’s parroting was convincing: In a 1997 Turing test that set one of Emmy’s ersatz compositions against a Bach-inspired piece written by a music professor and an actual work by the German composer, the audience thought Emmy’s rendition was the real deal.”
– Music writer
Philip Sherburne , on the pioneering work of American composer
David Cope whose neural net EMI or Emmy wrote 5,000 ‘new’ Bach chorales in the 1980s
The U.S. debut of Neural Swamp (2021), a multi-channel video installation by American artist Martine Syms made for The Future Fields Commission , opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the work, three characters trained on Syms’ voice engage in awkward, disjointed dialogue in a narrative ostensibly about golf (bolstered by related videogame footage), demonstrating the frustrating isolation of communication where “neither listening nor comprehension is possible.”
DOSSIER :
HOLO 3 guest editor
Nora N. Khan reveals the forth and final chapter of the forthcoming print edition. “AI ethicists and activists frequently argue that once the black boxes of AI are opened, users will have more agency,” notes Khan. “But what if we don’t understand the explanation?” Contributors
Ingrid Burrington ,
Ryan Kuo , Sera Schwarz, and
Jenna Sutela are tasked to answer.
“There’s something really interesting in the practice of critiquing automation through apparently menial labour: That by intentionally pursuing hard, human tasks, you can show the work that is done.”
– Artist and designer
Tobias Revell , theorising the reverse-engineering of OpenAI’s natural language processor
GPT-3 by a “time-rich” artist or writer. “The author of such a work would effectively be manually mining
ngrams for the
least likely combination of words that maintain some meaning.”
Psychologist Eiko Fried points out the curious path pattern 800 unsteered bicycles create when pushed in Matthew Cook ’s 2004 computer simulation. In his paper “It Takes Two Neurons To Ride a Bicycle ,” the CalTech mathematician and computer scientist demonstrated that a two-neuron network can learn how to cycle, displaying human characteristics: “Just as when a person rides a bicycle, the network is very accurate for long range goals, but in the short run stability issues dominate the behavior.”
Anna Ridler and Caroline Sinders ’ collaboration Cypress Trees: Fragmentation premieres as a façade projection at M Museum in Leuven, Belgium, as part of “(Un)Holy Light.” The infinite treescape generated from thousands of photographs taken by the artists draws attention to Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands, whose ancestral Cypress trees are vital to the state’s coastline. “The more they disappear, the more erosion accelerates,” notes curator Juliette Bibasse .
“AI needs to be brought back down to earth. It has been elevated to a superhuman level that leads us to believe it is both inevitable and beyond our control.”
– Ethiopian American AI scholar and computer scientist Dr.
Timnit Gebru , on the launch of her new Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research institute (DAIR). “When AI research, development and deployment is rooted in people and communities from the start, we can get in front of these harms and create a future that values equity and humanity,” she notes in the DAIR press release
Ethiopian American AI scholar and computer scientist Dr. Timnit Gebru announces the launch of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research institute (DAIR). With $3.7 million in funding from several foundations, the independent, community-rooted institute aims to “counter Big Tech’s pervasive influence on the research, development and deployment of AI.” The announcement comes on the one-year anniversary of her sudden ouster from Google, where she co-led the Ethical AI team.
“Past attempts to colonize space were spurned by civilization for being too boring. My goal is not only colonizing Mars, but entertaining everyone along the way.”
– Co-writers
Daniel Rourke &
GPT-3 , invoking the world’s richest man in
WHY I WANT TO FUCK ELON MUSK , a text for the upcoming “
All of Your Base ” exhibition at Aksioma (Ljubljana, Slovenia)
OUT NOW :
Sofian Audry
Art in the Age of Machine Learning
A critical examination (and historical positioning) of the use of machine learning across art and new media
“The characters experience their various BOB plugins through a hallucinatory interface; their neural guides are represented by red worms with up to three heads, each tipped with eye-like shapes, as if they can see the future.”
“It’s very Newtonian thinking: if you know how it started, can you predict where it may go? And I think every single location in latent space resonates with how we perceive what happens in our lives.”
– Media Artist
Refik Anadol , on the affective quality of the AI ‘hallucinations’ that shaped
Unsupervised , an NFT series on Feral File in which the Turkish-American artist trained an AI to make images based on MoMA collection metadata
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