For Google I/O 2019, the arts program previously known as “MoDA” was re-invented as I/O Arts. Curated in collaboration with Kenric McDowell from AMI, the focus was on artists who worked with AI and machine learning, and who’s pieces explored the three way exchange between human mind, machine mind and natural mind.
Curatorial Statement :
Art provides deep insight into the relationship between culture and technology. To understand AI and the future, we must work with artists. Google is dedicated to supporting practices that explore culturally impactful technologies such as machine learning. I/O Arts asks artists to reframe important technologies and show their potential uses outside of product goals and timelines.
This year, we explore co-creation: between artists and technologists, artists and machines, and between code and natural systems. By collaborating with non-human intelligence, the artists at I/O Arts point to a future where machine learning is used to better understand the interplay between natural, cultural and economic processes.
The pieces in I/O Arts are spread throughout the conference grounds and schedule, giving viewers a chance to absorb them between workshops and talks. As you walk the grounds and encounter the works, please allow these artist’s provocations to inspire new ways of imagining and using the technology at I/O
More info on the piece here
Anna Ridler - Mosaic Virus
Drawing Operations (Duet) is a performance centered on an improvised drawing collaboration between human and machine. In this duet, Sougwen and Drawing Operations Units: Generation 1&2 create a drawing corresponding to three themes related to human and robotic co-creation: Mimicry, Memory and Future Speculations.
Each thematic chapter showcases an evolving robotic behavior linked to the artist's explorations of art and AI. The 25 minute performance is accompanied by a visual projection and an original score by Aquarian. The work is part of an ongoing series of collaborative robotic performances by Sougwen Chung.
Drawing Operations (Duet) debuted at the Art Science Museum in Singapore as part of Global Art Forum: I am not a Robot and was recently shown at Miami Art Basel 2018.
nimiia cétiï (2018) is an audiovisual work by Jenna Sutela that uses machine learning to generate a new written and spoken language. This language is based on the computer's interpretation of a Martian tongue from the late 1800s, originally channeled by the French medium Hélène Smith and now voiced by Sutela. The text in the film was generated by the movement of Bacillus subtilis nattō, an extremophilic bacterium that, according to recent spaceflight experimentation, can survive on Mars. The machine, in this project is a medium, channeling messages from entities that usually cannot speak. In this work the intelligent machine becomes an alien of our own creation.
nimiia cétiï was created in collaboration with Memo Akten and Damien Henry as part of n-dimensions, Google Arts & Culture's artist-in-residence program at Somerset House Studios.