HOW TO FIND THE SOUL OF A SAILOR
Kasia Molga presents a very personal journey to find the soul of her father in data from a life spent on the seas.
Molga spent her childhood travelling with her sailor father on merchant navy vessels. Her father often was the lone parent caring for her on board the ship. They were two people who understood each other without words - sometimes Molga felt she could read her dad's thoughts. He passed away quite unexpectedly 15 years ago leaving a huge hole in Molga's heart and many diaries from his journeys. Sometimes when Molga fears that her memories of being on the open sea with him are fading, she rereads his diaries trying to hang on to his voice.
The talk reports on experiments using The New Real's AI platform for sensing lost loved ones in small datasets. She investigates the peculiarities of her father’s writing to see if she can use it to recreate stories, in his voice, from some of her memories or diaries of places which she never visited with him but still would love. She will also explore if she can reveal his perception of oceans and maps and use it to “visualise” what he has seen and how he would see things nowadays.
Molga has constructed a dataset from ships' logs, her dad's own diaries, and a British Library collection of maps from the Mediterranean Sea. Using a Word2vec feature Molga explores 1) whether AI can convincingly recreate a way of writing such that aspects of her dad's personality can be 'sensed' 2) what are the implications and emotional effects of such a way of 'resurrecting' a person who is no longer with us, and 3) whether translations between Polish and English can improve the AI's performance for non-Polish speaking people, be true to Molga's memories, and even help to 'decolonise' the digital realm. The talk explores the challenges of working with 'small data', and challenges the normativity of English-language AI, looking at how the model behaves when built in and processing Polish. Molga reflects on the experience of finding memories and emotional connection to our loved ones through their digital afterlife, and the ethics of activities such as 'recreating' the fragments of their personalities to create an illusion of their presence.
Artist Talk, by Kasia Molga
About the artist
Kasia Molga (UK/PL) has refused to be labelled – design fusionist, artist, environmentalist, creative coder and technologist who for over a decade has sought ways of collaboration with nature, predominantly focusing on the ever-changing human relation to and perception of the natural environment and fellow ‘earthlings’. Her award winning work has been exhibited worldwide (i,e. Ars Electronica, Tate Modern, MIS (BR), Centre Pompidou and more). Kasia has taken part in many international art & science residencies and has lectured and mentored regularly in the EU and UK. An affinity with the ocean is evident in Kasia’s work, born from her time growing up on merchant navy vessels with her sailor father and she is the proud holder of a diving license.