TWO LOCATIONS – URBAN AND RURAL / RESIDENCY PROGRAMS – EUROPEAN MEDIA ART, NORDIC-BALTIC, INTERNATIONAL / RIXC OPEN AiR – APPLY ALL YEAR ROUND
Jasmina TESANOVIC / US-RS
Author, feminist, political activist, and filmmaker
Internet of Women Things, IoWT
It was my idea to have an open-source connected home of the future. My scheme was accepted by brave new geeks, brilliant people, but mostly male. They gave the house, “Casa Jasmina,” my name: I am grateful for that, but the house is not altogether comfortable.
People are diverse and live in bubbles of limited human understanding. Men and women, poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, designers, engineers — we might try to classify them as idealists or realists — the people in cloud bubbles, or the people in ground bubbles.
Now, a project like Casa Jasmina — is it a hands-on, practical, maker’s project struggling up toward ideals, or is it a set of ideals searching for grounded realities that might prove that high concepts are possible?
Is it a house for the cloud-bubble people, those who invent their own cloud-world before crashing into the ground (or at least landing on it, now and then, to pick up supplies)? Or is a grounded launch-pad for aspiration, where the ground-bubble people assemble tools to reach for the sky?
Keywords: Internet of Women Things, IoWT, critical thinking, design fiction, Casa Jasmina
Biography
Jasmina Tesanovic is a Feminist and political activist (Women in Black; CodePink) and a writer, journalist, musician, translator and film director. In 1978 she promoted the first feminist conference in Eastern Europe, “Drug-ca Zena” (Belgrade). With Slavica Stojanovic she designs and creates the first feminist publishing house in the Balkans, “Feminist 94?, lasting for 10 years. She is the author of “Diary of a Political Idiot”, translated in 12 languages: a real time war diary written during the 1999 conflict in Kosovo. Since then she has been publishing her works on blogs and other media, always connected to the Internet.
Dr. Ellen PEARLMAN / US
New media artist, critic, curator and writer
Parsons/New School University, ThoughtWorks Arts
Biometrics and Total Control
Though big data and fake news make the most headlines, the future of real global control will develop around a ‘quantified self’ including a deep dive into biometrics. Areas include the honing of facial recognition and eye scanning algorithms, genetic profiling, immersive experiences profiling (i.e. like Facebook data gathering, except around experiential preferences in AR/VR/MR), brain computer interfaces and the semantic/dream brain, and artificial intelligence algorithmic selectivity. The use and abuse of this information will be subject to nation state dictates ranging from socially conscious societies to rogue dictatorships. Using the arts practices developed in the ThoughtWorks Arts Residency and Art-A-Hack(TM), based in New York City, this presentation examines how arts practice can shed light on the implications of this coming storm.
Keywords: biometrics, arts practice, algorithms, AI, Machine learning, big data
Biography
Dr. Ellen Pearlman, a Fulbright World Learning Specialist in Art, New Media and Technology is on faculty at Parsons School of Design/New School University in New York City. She is Director of the ThoughtWorks Arts Residency, President of Art-A-Hack(TM) and Director and Curator of the Volumetric Society of New York. Her brain opera “Noor” was the world’s first fully immersive interactive brain opera in a 360 degree theater in Hong Kong, and she is working on a new brain opera, AIBO using emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence.
Mauro MARTINO / IT-US
Artist, designer, inventor and educator
IBM Research AI, Northeastern University
Fragile AI: Visualizing perturbations of Artificial Neural Network
After the publication of the paper “Intriguing properties of neural networks” in 2013 by Christian Szegedy, we have discovered that learning algorithms are vulnerable. Input data visually indistinguishable from “normal” input are specifically tuned so as to fool or mislead the machine learning system.
How is it possible that neural network-based image classifiers exchange the photo of a panda for a gibbon, and do it with a very high level of confidence, almost 100%? We are faced with a more fragile AI than we thought.
At the talk we will observe what happens during an attack on neural networks, we will enter into the layers and the neurons and filters of dozens of Deep Neural Network models, to discover their beauty and fragility.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, neural network, visualization, deep learning, adversarial examples
Biography
Mauro Martino is the founder and director of the Visual AI lab at IBM Research, with offices in Cambridge, US, and Professor of Practice at Northeastern University in Boston.
His works have been featured in important scientific journals such Nature, Science, PNAS, among all, and textbooks about data visualization: “Data Visualization”, “The Truthful Art”, “The Best American Infographics” 2015 and 2016 editions.
Mauro is an award-winning designer whose projects received the Gold Medal at The 2017 Vizzies Visualization Challenge by National Science Foundation, Innovation by Design Award by Fast Company, Kantar Information is Beautiful Award. His projects have been shown at international festivals and exhibitions including Ars