Seminar Series Artificial Life, AI, Art and Altered Nature Chapter 3 more-than-human assemblage
Date: 2022.09.03 (Sat.)
Time:8.30 p.m. – 10.30 p.m
Speakers: CROSSLUCID, Shuyi CAO, yiou penelope peng
Academic Host: yiou penelope peng
Language: English
Organized by
Aiiiii Art Center, Computational Media and Arts, HKUST(GZ), Chronus Art Center
Curated by
WU Ziwei, LI Xi, BI Xin, CAO Jiamin
Coordinator:
Saisai Liu
The term “Artificial Life” was coined by computer scientist Christopher Langton in 1987. However, the notion and practices of “artificial life” are far predated. This topic has long been an interest of scientists and artists, who have been exploring the fundamental principles of life and attempting to think life in the context of an artificial system.
In recent times, Artificial Intelligence algorithms have been widely implemented in various interdisciplinary fields including Computational Biology and Synthetic Biology. Through synthesising or simulating hardware, software, and wetware, technology restructures and represents the characteristics of the natural living system. Meanwhile, in the increasingly participatory interactions between humans and non-human entities, the technological assemblage also behaves like a living organism, performing in the collaboration and cohabitation with environment.
How can life be reimagined in the process of the transition? What is the aesthetics in Artificial Intelligence and the realm of life? How can artificial beings perform in symbiosis with the community and even influence society and culture? How do we perceive the ethical and moral issues?
Co-organized by Chronus Art Center, Aiiiii Art Center, Computational Media and Arts, and HKUST(GZ), the seminar aims to bring artists, scientists, and scholars together to discuss from different perspectives how and why artists and scientists create Artificial Life. How was technology inspired by living things? How to understand the biological nature of technology? How have these fields entangled with nature and present themselves in another form of nature?
Chapter 3 more-than-human assemblage
The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the ‘other’.
Karen Barad,
Meeting the Universe Halfway:
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.
According to Karen Barad, to be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack independent, self-contained existence. In a more-than-human world, diverse creatures, objects, (non)organisms, forces and materialities are entangled across porous bodies, collectively operating as assemblages of human and nonhuman agencies, facilitating the socio-material changes. However, such complex constellations are never uniform in their nature, as they need to co-function, co-mediate, and co-habit among different entities.
The complexity, differences and diversity in such assemblages are the topics we would like to address and explore in this event. How can we imagine an open machine intelligence ecology incorporating reciprocal aesthetics and planetary thinking into Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning? How do we narrate the facts and dreams that are integrated with and interfered by technoscientific processes from manifold cosmologies and not-just-human sensibilities? How can we encounter the myriad happenings and fall into an entangled world of many worlds?
The panel discussion invites Shuyi CAO, the currently participating artist of the exhibition Entangled: bio/media, the artist collective CROSSLUCID, and scholar and writer yiou penelope peng to elaborate on their responses to the above questions.
Aiiiii Art Center
Aiiiii Art Center (Est. 2021) is an artificial intelligence art institution based in Shanghai. The organisation seeks to support, promote, as well as incubate both international and domestic artists and projects related to intelligent algorithms. Aiiiii Art Center is committed to becoming a pioneer of artificial intelligence through the discovering of exciting possibilities afforded by the intersections of creativity and technology.
Aiiiii Art Center aims to offer insight into the many challenges, practices, and creative modes of artificial intelligence based art. Such aims will be achieved through academic conferences and published research efforts conducted either independently or in collaboration with domestic and international institutions and organisations. This organisation will also actively promote and showcase the exploratory uses of artificial intelligence based art in practice.
The Computational Media and Arts (CMA)
The Computational Media and Arts (CMA) Thrust of Information Hub comprises both art and technology, focusing on art creation and visual communication with advanced emerging technologies.
As an interdisciplinary program for computational and radical creativity, CMA brings together visionaries with backgrounds in art, design, science, and engineering to think critically, reach beyond convention and make innovation. Faculty and students work together across disciplines like art with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), AI-generated art, information art and design, and data visualization. Art creation and visual communication are carried out in the exchange and collision of art and tech with social impact for the public to understand and enrich their lives, environment, and communities.
CROSSLUCID
CROSSLUCID is an art collective co-founded by Sylwana Zybura and Tomas C. Toth in Shanghai in 2018. They live and work in Berlin and engage in highly collaborative cross-cultural creative processes.
Their interdisciplinary practice encompasses moving image & film, photography, digital 3D techniques, poetic AI and experience-led interventions utilising world-building and experience design strategies. Based on extensive research into the nature of reality; spiritual practices understood through science; the network self or sexuality and intimacy in the digital age, they develop evolving projects often utilising the multi-layered techniques of collage, assemblage, visual essay and networked processes.
Interlacing archetypes and symbols, artificial intelligence and science fiction as well as mythologies from across time and place, they create scenarios and build experiential formats that instigate the prototyping and rehearsing of impending futures and progressing ‘metamodern’ values.https://crosslucid.zone/
Shuyi CAO
Shuyi CAO (b.1990, China) is a New York-based artist. Shuyi Cao’s practice explores alchemical approaches to object making and knowledge production. Her latest works seek models of reorienting a more-than-human world with intertwined social and ecological uncertainties. Interested in the complex relationship between geological, biological, and technological matters, she creates objects as physical manifestations of this dynamic material reality. They are speculative specimens and archeological fictions with reconfigured natural objects and hand-made artifacts, incorporating chemical and organic processes, moving images, and sound. Her sculptures synthesize multiple mediums including glass, ceramic, silicone, and resin, as well as digitally manipulated and fabricated artifacts. The assemblage suggests heterogeneous temporality, evoking transition and metamorphosis through both material and form.
https://www.shuyicao.com/
yiou penelope peng (oxi pëng | 彭憶歐)
yiou penelope peng (oxi pëng | 彭憶歐), previously trained as a pianist and a scholar in cinema studies at smith college, university college of london, is now a phd. candidate at free university berlin for her research on the ‘touch’, ‘transformation’ and ‘interweaving’ among various non- and living beings in performative happenings. she attempts to embody a speculative performance analysis about plants, matter, cyborgs, spirits, aliens and non-definable entities from anthropocosmic perspectives.
yiou practices (embodied writing), creates (psychedelic poetry), and dreams (of pink tardigrade) softly.
http://www.yioupennypeng.com