The Creative-Ai (AI and the Artistic Imaginary – WASP-HS, https://www.kth.se/hct/mid/research/cmt/projects/ai-and-the-artistic-imaginary-1.1100143) and MUSAiC (https://musaiclab.wordpress.com) project teams at KTH kindly welcome you to the next seminar in our series “dialogues: probing the future of creative technology” on Friday 28 March, 17-18h (CEST).
This seminar (held on zoom, https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/63477441422) features two artists exploring technology in the context of their work. We start with presentations by both guests followed by a discussion between each other and then the audience.
IMPORTANT: If you wish to join, please send your name (zoom handle) to associate professor Bobby Lee Townsend Sturm JR (KTH) so that you will be admitted.
Guests: Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (PE/SE) and Laura Devendorf (USA)
Paola will talk us through some of her works and performances, focusing on the presence of code, textile, multisensorial experiences, and how her interest in patterns led her to experiment with Artificial Intelligence, all framed within a critical approach to these same technologies and their social impact. She will go through some of the ideas proposed in the Neokhipukamayoq Manifesto regarding the possible development of technologies that are not created in opposition to nature: how would these be if parting from Andean/Indigenous philosophies, and placed within a syncretic, hybrid framework?
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (PE/SE) is an artist and researcher of transdisciplinarity, working with textile assemblages and embroideries, painting, sound, text, digital media, interactive art, A.I. and video.
She explores the boundaries and connections in between tactility, the visual and audio, related to the human voice, to nature, and to synthetic ones whose listening is often considered less harmonious, such as machine or digital noises. Her work is complex: she explores the limits of the senses, examining the concepts of interpretation, translation, and misrepresentation, to reflect on mediated sensorial experiences while questioning the cultural hegemony within the history of Technology and the Arts.
She is the recipient of the Stockholms stads kulturstipendium 2022 and of the Honorary Mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2021. She has also has been awarded the Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant from Google Arts and Culture and Google AI in 2020 and was the winner of the “Local Media: Amazon Ecoregion: contest of Vivo Arte.mov in Brazil, 2013. Her works are in collections of the Swedish Public Art Agency and Malmo City Museum.
Laura Devendorf will present a speculation rooted in her experience weaving electronics and developing software for weaving electronics. Laura will introduce the basics of woven structure in terms of its mechanical properties as well as methods by which it is designed and manipulated. Laura will also present some of the exciting opportunities for design and interaction when we consider weaving as a method of electronics production: such as the ability for textile structures to unravel, mended, and to be continually modified. Each of these underlying discussions will frame a provocation about alternative ways we might build, use, and unbuild our electronic products.
Laura Devendorf, assistant professor of information science with the ATLAS Institute, is an artist and technologist working predominantly in human-computer interaction and design research. She designs and develops systems that embody alternative visions for human-machine relations within creative practice. Her recent work focuses on smart textiles—a project that interweaves the production of computational design tools with cultural reflections on gendered forms of labor and visions for how wearable technology could shape how we perceive lived environments. Laura directs the Unstable Design Lab. She earned bachelors’ degrees in studio art and computer science from the University of California Santa Barbara before earning her PhD at UC Berkeley School of Information. She has worked in the fields of sustainable fashion, design and engineering. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, has been featured on National Public Radio, and has received multiple best paper awards at top conferences in the field of human-computer interaction.
