Human Machine
About Uncertain Landscapes and the Anarchy of the Soul
An evening with talks, artistic presentations, concert and book presentation. In the first part, the AI Anarchies Book will be presented as closing of the artistic programme, which took place from 2022–2023 on the topic artificial intelligence and ethics. In the second part of the evening, current fellows and jurors of the Human Machine Programme present and discuss artistic concepts and strategies.
Programme
7 pm
Words of Welcome: Anh-Linh Ngo, Vice-President of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Part 1
The AI Anarchies Book
Book Presentation & Talk: Bianca Herlo, Clara Herrmann, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Tiara Roxanne, Siegfried Zielinski
Moderation: Petja Ivanova
AI Anarchies – as a fellowship programme (2022–2023), as a school, and now, as a book – focuses on artificial intelligence and ethics. We chose to focus on AI, in part, because artists have been grappling with the ethical problems of so-called “intelligent” machines long before artificial intelligence emerged from an experimental research workshop, as a fledgling technological discipline in mid-1950s America. We focus on anarchy because, although it seems to carry the weight of disorder and chaos, we use it, as Maya Indira Ganesh writes in her reflection, “as a centring and politicising of experimentation and critique, resisting-as-generative engagement, and re-framing our situation as humans in a data-driven world through alternate histories, accounts, and futures.”
In a short talk, Bianca Herlo, scientist and participant of the AI Anarchies autumn school, Clara Herrmann, Head of JUNGE AKADEMIE, Elise Misao Hunchuck, co-editor of the AI Anarchies Book, Tiara Roxanne, speaker and participant of the AI Anarchies autumn school, and Siegfried Zielinski, part of the advisory board for AI Anarchies, look back on common grounds. What are the little anarchies that we could build into our belief systems?
7:50 pm
TRANSIENT #5
Concert: Pedro Oliveira (Mel-Filterbank, Electronics) and Gugulethu Duma (Voice, Electronics)
In this performance, Gugulethu and Pedro conjure up textures weaving in and through the many possible activations of a filter – a reproduction of the filterbank present simultaneously in the 1964 “Subharchord II” synthesizer from the GDR as well as in the BAMF Dialect recognition software (in use since 2017) – to bring forth its material, haptic qualities, sonically but also politically.
Break
Part 2
8:15 pm
Introduction: Clara Herrmann, Head of JUNGE AKADEMIE & Helen Turner, Artistic Director E-WERK Luckenwalde
The complex relationship between human and machine has been the subject of art since industrialisation. The Human Machine Programme supports international emerging artists, who work with, or address ideas surrounding digital technologies, the anthropocene, and/or Artificial Intelligence in the broadest sense; who seek to challenge the Western story of “progress” and problematic dualisms of “natural” and “artificial” and offer new ideas of patterns, narrations and approaches to a world with machines and who explore urgent aspects of today’s societies and the planet and transform their research into aesthetically compelling forms.
The climate emergency and wars are currently fuelling dystopian scenarios and artistic research into the visualisation of destruction, as well as the concept of empathy and strategies of remembrance or the representation of life and growth in the context of digital technologies.
8:20 pm
On Demining Technologies and Never-ending Wars
Lecture Performance: Maithu Bùi
Maithu Bùi is a research activist and artist. In their project, they explore demining processes and the exploitation of marginalised living beings and technologies in the removal of mines and explosive remnants of war and their environmental impact. In dystopian present and future scenarios, the artist critically examines the use of AI/ML, bioengineered bioluminescent organisms, robots, and marginalised groups involved in the detection and transformation of explosives.
8:35 pm
Map-making Machine
Lecture Performance: Sonya Isupova
Sofia Isupovas current projects explore the concepts of postcoloniality, territoriality, and the dichotomy of what constitutes a map in an uncertain world. Her focus lies in the fusion of visual art, technology and collaborative praxis through machines. She has built a machine, a metaphorical satellite hovering above the land, mapping the data with the limited amount of accuracy. The images that are being printed come straight from the commercial crop monitoring satellite called EOS SAT. The machine can draw landscapes and show life and growth, recovery and renewal in Ukraine.
Followed by an artist talk with Maithu Bùi and Sonya Isupova
Moderation: Sinthujan Varatarajah
சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) is an independent researcher and essayist based in Berlin. The focus of their work is statelessness, mobility and geographies of power with a special focus on infrastructure, logistics and architecture.
9:10 pm
A certain Anarchy of the Soul
Lecture Performance: Franziska Aigner
Franziska Aigner & Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi explore the epistemological, aesthetic, and political possibilities of choreocinema from the perspective of a common and shared point of view – an archive of loss – assembled by the artist duo, which will culminate in a short film to be realized next year. The images assembled in the archive will range from personal memories to mediated historical narratives and serve as a point of departure from which one can remember and imagine, speculate and dream. For the Human Machine symposium, Franziska Aigner will assemble and present reflections on the conjunction between technics, memory, and authority. The context of this conjunction is the question of acting in general, and how to act inside the film to be shot next year in particular.
9:30 pm
Empathy Machine
Lecture Performance: HSURAE
HSURAE is an artist and educator. Their practice embraces the concept of latency within nature and its artifice. Instead of working to reveal or accelerate, they find small pleasures in the indeterminacy that latent space and latent knowledge offers. For the Human Machine project, they are working with Colin McSwiggen, a mathematician and artist, to build a language model whose understanding of the world is based on differences between concepts rather than on an identification between them. They call this an empathy machine for it challenges the paradox that confines traditional empathy: the tension between difference and similarity. In this evening's performative lecture, HSURAE will present a meditation on the artificialization of language and a poetics of machine empathy.
Followed by an artist talk with Franziska Aigner and HSURAE
Moderation: Tiara Roxanne
Tiara Roxanne is a Purhépecha (descendant) / settler Italian Mestiza scholar and artist based in Berlin. Roxanne’s work is dedicated to rethinking the ethics of AI through an anti-colonial and cyberfeminist lens. By taking a multidisciplinary approach, their research on data colonialism interrogates how big data and data mining systems govern a colonial imposition through design and (visual) representation.
10 pm
Break and Open Bar
10:20 pm
Late night concert: Pedro Oliveira and Gugulethu Duma
The JUNGE AKADEMIE deals with the topic of so-called “intelligent machines” and their impact on life and art since 2019 in diverse artistic programmes. The programme Human Machine was founded in 2020 in cooperation with the programme VISIT of the E.ON foundation. The E-WERK Luckenwalde is partner since 2022. The programme AI Anarchies took place from 2022–2023, supported by the German Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media.