TWO LOCATIONS – URBAN AND RURAL / RESIDENCY PROGRAMS – EUROPEAN MEDIA ART, NORDIC-BALTIC, INTERNATIONAL / RIXC OPEN AiR – APPLY ALL YEAR ROUND
The adoption of novel technologies, such as artificial intelligence, is radically changing our society, the way we live and work. However, people’s lives are shaped and influenced by this technological race without the time or necessary knowledge to understand the implications and effects. On the other hand, there is enormous interest in this renewed convergence of art and technology around the globe. At the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design at Oslo Metropolitan University (Norway), we have started a collaboration between the Art in Society research group and the Applied Artificial Intelligence research group, with the aim of investigating new ideas and encourage speculations on possible futures, and through art explore new potentialities emerging from the development of intelligent machines. By researching at the boundary of science, fiction and art, we seek to explore future (speculative) scenarios at the intersection of biological life (humans) and artificial life (intelligent machines), through art. As a first step, students from Master in Art, Design and Drama were invited to learn from and interpret research projects in the Applied Artificial Intelligence research group. We will reflect on the collaboration and present two examples of resulting projects:
1. Random colouring has been exploited in art, for example by Damien Hirst’s spot painting, as humans are fascinated by the nature of random sequences. However, humans do not always perceive true random as random and, on the other hand, may perceive non-random distributions as random. Random number generators are key components of modern algorithms, e.g. artificial intelligence, as well as traditional computing systems. Natural and biological systems also display random and complex emergent patterns at the boundary of chaos and order, i.e. edge-of-chaos (Langton, 1990). In this work, we create and investigate art visualizations using Random Discrete Colour Sampling algorithm (Lieng et al., 2012).
2. Several aspects of the behaviour of social insects, such as ants, has served as inspiration for multi-agent research in artificial intelligence and swarm robotics. Inspired by the pheromone-based form of communication, a swarm of robots equipped with infrared sensors is placed on a heat sensitive surface (thermochromic paint) that changes colour based on robot movements, thus producing a continuously changing emergent artistic exhibition, which seeks to display a form of living technology and artificial life (Penny, 2017).