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Tag: AI art

SEMINAR TOMORROW (Feb 2) on intersections of Art and AI, including Synthetic Data, Deep Fakes

(Text provided by the organizers)

The Creative-Ai (AI and the Artistic Imaginary – WASP-HS) and MUSAiC project teams at KTH kindly welcome you to the third seminar in our series “dialogues: probing the future of creative technology” on Thursday 2 February, 15:00-16:00 (CEST).

This seminar (held on zoom, https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/67706212115), we talk about “Artistic and legal-philosophical perspectives on deep fakes”. We start with two presentations from our invited guests (see below), followed by a discussion between each other and then with the audience.

Our guests are Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti and Katja de Vries:

Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti are an award-winning experiential artist duo who founded their collaborative art practice, known as Operator, in 2016. Referred to as “the two critical contemporary voices on digital art’s international stages” (Clot Magazine), their expertises collide in large scale conceptual works recognizable for their poetic approach to technology. Ti’s background as an immersive artist and HCI technologist, and Catherine’s as a choreographer, performance artist and gender scholar make for a uniquely medium-fluent output–bringing together environments, technology and the body.

Operator has been awarded a Lumen Prize (Immersive Environments), ADC Award (Gold Cube), S+T+ARTS Prize (Honorary Mention), and MediaFutures (a European Commission funded programme). They’ve been speakers at Christie’s Art+Tech Summit, Art Basel, MIT Open Doc Lab, BBC Click, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY, Ars Electronica, Contemporary Istanbul, and CADAF. Ti and Catherine are originally from Los Angeles and currently based in Berlin.

Title: Soft Evidence–Synthetic cinema as contemporary art

Abstract:
Art has always explored notions of truth and fiction, and the relationship between image and reality. Synthetic media’s capability to depict events that never happened makes that relationship more complex than ever. How can artists use synthetic media/deepfakes creatively, and start conversations about ethics and the social implications of unreliable realities? In this presentation, artist duo Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti of Operator discuss their work Soft Evidence–a slow synthetic cinema series created as part of MediaFutures in 2021. They will detail how research and interviews with experts on media manipulation in law, education, and activism informed their creative and technical processes. As experiential artists, Ti and Catherine plan to exhibit Soft Evidence as an installation, a site for the public to learn and process a rapidly changing media landscape through immersion and feeling states.

(For Katja:)
Katja de Vries is an assistant professor in public law at Uppsala 
University. Her work operates at the intersection of IT law and 
philosophy of technology. Her current research focuses on the challenges 
that AI-generated content (‘deepfakes’ or ‘synthetic data’) poses to 
data protection, intellectual property and other fields of law.

Title: How can law deal with the counterfactual metaphysics of synthetic 
media?

Abstract:
How can law deal with deep fakes and synthetic media? Law is influenced 
by the politics, norms and ontologies of the society in which it 
operates but is never exhausted by it. Law always first and foremost 
obeys to an already existing system of parameters, rules concepts and 
ontologies, to which new elements can only be incrementally added. This 
contributes to legal certainty and foreseeability, as well as law’s 
slowness to adapt.
The EU legislator is trying to adapt to new digital challenges and 
opportunities by creating a true avalanche of legislation. In the case 
of deep fakes and other synthetic media the question, however, is if 
operative concepts such as transparency and informed consent and 
dichotomies such as fact v. fiction, human v. machine, etc. work well 
with the counterfactual metaphysics of synthetic media, namely the 
articulation of what is possible into digital mathematical spaces of 
seemingly endless alternative realities, and extensions in time and 
space. More concretely: is it important to simply flag that we are 
interacting with a synthetic work? Can we consent to live-on forever in 
disseminating digital alter-egos?

AI-artist: You are WANTED!

We are reaching out to you as an artist who creates inspiring work involving AI, and would like to invite you to participate in an interview study. It would mean the world to us in this WASP-HS research project AI and the Artistic Imaginary!

Our research team at KTH (and LiU) is working on a project that investigates sustainability and ethics of Creative-AI. Our goal is to understand how creative practitioners are using AI technologies in their work processes, and to reflect on this from sustainability and ethics perspectives. Our interviews are expected to inform Creative-AI practitioners (artists as well as engineers) working in the field. 

In the future, we plan to expand this to other forms of collaborations (workshops, design and development of Creative-AI systems, etc.) with interested artists.

Some basic information about the interviews:

  • Interview takes approximately 1 hour and will be conducted at an agreed-upon time (flexible) on Zoom. 
  • Research is anonymized/pseudonymized and your data will be treated according to GDPR guidelines
  • The interview will be recorded (audio, video) for internal analysis purposes
  • Transcriptions and other anonymized material will be shared for non-commercial purposes only

We can provide a voucher as a gesture of gratitude for your time and effort.  

Please let us know if you would be interested in participating in our study, and do not hesitate to ask for further information. Don’t be shy – email us, Petra and Anna-Kaisa!


Wishing you a nice summer!

Kind regards,

Petra Jääskeläinen (researcher) – email: ppja@kth.se

Anna-Kaisa Kaila (researcher) – email: akkaila@kth.se

Andre Holzapfel (principal investigator)

Bob L. T. Sturm (co-principal investigator)

Cecilia Åsberg (co-principal investigator)

KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

MUSaiC FESTIVAL

November 22-24 Stockholm

A series of lectures and concerts devoted to the themes of the MUSAiC Project and beyond! How can one judge applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to music along dimensions of utility, impact, and ethics? How do creative AI systems affect the use and worth of music in particular contexts? How can ethical considerations be folded into the engineering and application of these kinds of systems? Should there be “laws of AI” that make explicit the responsibility of the AI technologist to the domains where the technology is to be applied? What creative possibilities are hindered or facilitated by the “flaws” of an AI system’s knowledge of music?

Confirmed Keynotes

Jonathan Sterne, Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology

Cecilia Åsberg, Professor and director of the Posthumanities Hub, Linköping University

Eric A Drott, Associate Professor of Theory, University of Texas at Austin

Confirmed Speakers and Performers

This event is organized by Bob L. T. Sturm (KTH) in collaboration with KMH and Fylkingen, with funding provided by:

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