Responding to COVID-19 and the Climate Emergency through data-driven art
Image. Screenshot of AWEN app.
Martin Zeilinger discusses a survey of AI artists that informed AWEN and The New Real Observatory
Early in 2021, The New Real, in partnership with the Edinburgh Science Festival, set out to develop a new data-driven artwork that could both engage a Festival audience during a Covid-19 lockdown, and also inspire behavioural and/or attitudinal change on the climate emergency.
Underlying this ambition, a number of crucially important concerns – to do with the usability, sustainability, and accessibility of computational technologies – quickly began to take shape. It became clear that art practices dealing with large bodies of data, AI systems, and other emerging technologies must always also concern themselves with a wide range of issues to do with media and technology that are not always well defined or understood.
Our questions in the project included:
How can complex computational systems be used to facilitate localised, community-oriented, accessible cultural experiences, so that the artworks can serve to elucidate the workings and capabilities of these same systems, rather than obfuscating them?
How can we ensure that artworks can foster critical literacies concerning immensely powerful technologies that are by many non-specialists perceived to be so complex as to be virtually unknowable?
How can emerging data-driven technologies such as artificial technology be used in the creation of cultural experiences that invite their audiences to contemplate and tackle the biggest challenges we are facing today, such as humanity’s impact on the planet, the climate crisis, or issues of surveillance and data privacy – even if these same technologies are by many understood to be deeply implicated in how these challenges were brought about in the first place?
The project adopted an open prototyping methodology. I was invited to survey artists who might be commissioned as a part of the co-creation research. During my research, an impressive landscape of existing creative practices and art projects emerged. I was quickly able to validate one of the founding ideas behind The New Real, namely that for many artists who are experimenting creatively at the forefront of emerging technologies, such questions are already informing and are often directly addressed in much of their work. Many artists working with AI are engaged in exploring the impact of new technologies on our socio-cultural and ecological lifeworlds, or their work might speculate on the emergence of productive interfaces between new technologies and their users. These were precisly the kinds of domains we identified as most relevant for the artistic commission in this project, including AI, the Anthropocene, and big data analytics.
A good example is the work of Tega Brain, an Australian-born artist now living and working in NYC. Brain’s art practice often links environmental issues to technological infrastructures and networked data systems, frequently with a focus on conveying highly complex information about the Anthropocene and dystopic climate futures in accessible and engaging formats. Many of her projects are designed with a focus on public engagement, accessibility, and educational contexts. Often, this means visualising complex bodies of data relating, for example, to carbon emissions, energy consumptions, or climate change. This has resulted both in technologically highly sophisticated work, such as Asunder (2018), an AI-based ‘environmental management’ tool that simulates future alterations required to keep the planet safely within boundaries of survivability (often with absurd requirements and/or results), but also strikingly simple works such as The Phenology Clock (2014), a clock-like installation that conveys critical information about the temporalities of the anthropocene, such as life cycles of plants native to a specific locality. Both of these works represent efforts to make extremely complex systems – plant life cycles, the ecosphere, large bodies of environmental data – human-computable in the form of art installations in which complexity becomes affective experience. In the case of Asunder, this also means exploring absurd dystopian elements of futuristic technologies, including, for example, AI-based suggestions to erase or relocate entire mega-cities in order to keep planet Earth survivable for its human inhabitants.
Another artist whose work focuses strongly on the making-experiential of sophisticated technological systems, and on the exploration of how human users can and interact with such systems and explore their potentials is Memo Akten. The majority of Akten’s work explores the creative affordances of AI and ML, often with the specific aim of making these technologies accessible to wider audiences. A common theme in his work is a focus on “the nature of nature,” including phenomena such as seeing, sensing, and consciousness, all of which represent extremely complex potential interfaces between human users and computational systems. In this sense, Akten’s work explores crossings-over between biological and artificial intelligence. For example, Learning to See, an extensive series of interconnected projects and experiments first presented in 2017, focuses on the interpretability of data, and speculates on ways in which human and non-human systems can learn from one another while also expressing information for one another. Among the most interesting instantiations of the project is an interactive installation that invites audience members to manipulate simple object such as cables placed on a table. This simple interaction in recorded by a camera and processed by an AI system that tries to visualise for the human audience what it ‘sees.’ Because the underlying neural network was trained only on the basis of very specific real-world images (such as waves lapping on the shore, or the flames of a wood fire), the resulting outputs, even though they can be highly realistic, bear no resemblances to the real-world impressions on which they are based. This allows audiences to explore transcendental questions of perception and seeing through the latent space outputs of neural networks, and the series overall, by implication, addresses critical questions about interpretation, meaning, and understanding.
There are many other examples of AI-driven, technology-based art projects that explore the utility of emerging technologies right alongside questions of their sustainability, ethics, aesthetics, and medium-specific particularities. Among those that instantly spring to mind would be Pierre Huygghes installation UUmwelt, commissioned by Serpentine Galleries in 2018, which deals with the co-evolution of human and non-human agents, or Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg’s Machine Auguries (2019), a sound installation that explores, through AI-generated bird song, how the light and sound pollution of urban lifestyles affect birds, while also demonstrating AI systems’ ability to assume the aural identities of real and imagined songbirds
For artists working in virtually every medium, challenges and obstacles are piling up high these days. In the context of this ongoing pandemic, will exhibition spaces or performance venues be allowed to welcome audiences? Can the artwork be experienced virtually, or in other ways that accommodate public health concerns? How does an artwork contribute to global concerns surrounding the environmental impact and sustainability of our manifold uses of technology?
As revealed in our landscape review of existing and emerging practices among artists working with large computational systems and AI, the concerns reflected in our co-creation brief reverberates through many, many digital artworks. One of them is now AWEN, the project that emerged through this co-creation process, featuring lead artist Inés Cámara Leret, science lead Matjaz Vidmar, and a wider team of artists, scientists and researchers. The experience takes the form of a real-world ‘walking simulator’ that stimulates a series of dialogues: between human and computational system and about environmental data and climate change. With its mediataive and non-confrontational nature, the creative voice of AWEN gently queries the possibilities of learning about the massive-scale systems in which human agents find themselves embedded, and about the potentials for using the knowledge gained to the collective benefit of these systems and their participants and inhabitants.
Martin Zeilinger is an author on Illuminating the New Real: Art and critical AI literacies and Towards a Heuristic Model for Experiential AI: Analysing The Zizi Show in The New Real.