Highcross

Podcast : Interview Art-AI Festival team & participants

Long play: Rob Watson & John Coster, the DIY-DMU Podcast team based at Leicester Media School, De Montfort University, interview the Art-AI Festival team and participants at Highcross

Rob Watson and John Coster, the duo behind the popular DIY-DMU Podcast, present their ‘on tour’ interview with the Art-AI Festival team and some of the participants in Anna Fuste’s PaperCubes workshops that ran at Highcross. They discuss the background and focus of the Festival, the different perspectives of the organisers on AI and its future impacts, and find out what the children (10 years old) and head teacher from the Sandfield Close Primary School think about their experiences of its applications.

http://robwatsonmedia.net/diy-dmu-podcast-016-art-ai-festival/

Interviewees:

Chris Tyrer, Digital Arts Manager at Phoenix

Amrit and Dylan, students at Sandfield Close Primary School, Leicester

Mrs Eammes, head teacher at Sandfield Close Primary School, Leicester

Luba Elliott, independent AI-arts curator and researcher

Anna Fuste, researcher at MIT Medialab

Tracy Harwood, Professor of Digital Culture at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University

Fabrizio Poltronieri’s video of his AI installation, #LoveApparatus (located Highcross), for the Art-AI Festival

A short video diary by Fabrizio Poltronieri about his Art-AI Festival installation, shown at Highcross Shopping Centre between 30 April and 13 May 2018. Fabrizio is a researcher/artist/coder at De Montfort’s Institute of Creative Technologies (Leicester). The installation was called “#LoveApparatus” – it was an artificial intelligence with its own Twitter account, @apparatus_love, that it used to reply to messages sent to it which had incorporated the hastag #LoveLeics. The AI was trained on a vast database of international poetry themed around ‘love’ and over the 2 weeks it was ‘live’ at Highcross, it learnt a great deal about love in the City of Leicester. More to follow on this in due course.

In support of the installation, the acclaimed Highcross Beacons, located at the St Peter’s Square entrance area of Highcross, were used to draw attention to the role of the AI and how to communicate with it – all imbued with love for the City. The Beacons comprise seven digital columns each standing over 3M, which were installed in 2016 as a focus for community engagement through public art. They were a very impressive way to draw attention to ‘an AI in the building’!

(image thanks to Tina Barton, Highcross Community Manager)

Anna Fuste (MIT Medialab) video diary of her Paper Cubes and HyperCubes projects for the Art-AI Festival 2018 children’s workshops

A short video by Anna Fuste on her workshops with the Sandfield Close Primary School children at the Art-AI Festival 2018 – the ‘tell’ is in the smiles! Thank you, Anna.