installation – Page 2

Installation : Britbot

The Britbot was originally commissioned for Sky Arts as part of their Arts 50 programme. It is an online voice activated chatbot that asks open-ended questions about ‘Britishness’ following topics in the UK citizenship test and corresponding book Life in the United Kingdom. Britbot responds to the answers given by someone interacting with it by sifting through hundreds of books, online articles and debates from which it compiles a reply it judges to be the best fit.

Britbot has been online since June 2018 and overtime has learnt from the people it interacts with. Its aim is to gather and reflect a diverse range of views and insights about what ‘Britishness’ really means today. When Britbot leaves Leicester’s Art AI Festival, it will be reformatted into a legacy website with insights drawn from its conversations with audiences. A book will also be published based on a selection of interactions with users.

As part of the ART AI Festival 2019 artwork trail, Libby Heaney's Britbot is on display at Phoenix, 4 Midland Street, Leicester, LE1 1TG - download map.

Installation : Interstitial Space 2019

In this new interactive installation for the ART-AI festival, Klingemann has created an open feedback loop between the viewer and a portrait- generating adversarial network (GAN) – a type of AI system where two neural networks are pitted against each other.

Through a camera, the system behind the installation observes its own output - as it is being projected onto the wall of the gallery - and tries to identify facial features in real time. These features are then reinterpreted by a GAN that has been trained on portraiture from western art, which then becomes part of a new output, projected on the opposite wall of the space.

The noise and misinterpretation introduced by the neural models involved in this process mean that this system will never repeat itself, revealing the nature of the data it has been trained on. By stepping into the gap between the camera and the projection, the viewer’s portrait becomes part of the cycle and they can attempt to take control over the emerging visuals.

As part of the ART AI Festival 2019 artwork trail, Mario Klingemann's Interstitial Space 2019 is on display at Phoenix, 4 Midland Street, Leicester, LE1 1TG - download map.

Comments from Ernest Edmonds, pioneer of AI in art

It is exciting to have the Art-AI Festival in Leicester this year and very appropriate to see the strong support from De Montfort University. DMU’s involvement goes back nearly 50 years, when it was Leicester Polytechnic.

(available on Amazon)

Two Invention of Problems events around 1970 showed art experiments and presented talks on the subject, including by one of the most important pioneers of AI in art, Edward Ihnatowicz. He returned later in the 70s for what was probably the first full conference on the subject, Human and Robot Behaviour. That was a meeting of scientific and artistic minds coming from such groups as Edinburgh’s AI Lab and the Royal College of Art.

A few years later another pioneer of Art and AI, the late Harold Cohen, spent some time at Leicester Polytechnic inspiring both staff and students. Today DMU’s Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT) is a strong player in the Art-AI field with several members using AI in their art and music as a standard part of their practice.

(both available on Amazon)

Craig Vear is an internationally renowned composer whose music employs AI and I myself have employed AI in various aspects of my art for most of my career. The latest work of Fabrizio Poltronieri, a relatively recent recruit to IOCT, can be seen as part of the festival.

(Fabrizio Poltronieri’s installation for the Art-AI Festival,

located in Highcross Shopping Centre)

Ernest Edmonds

Professor of Computational Art

Institute of Creative Technologies

De Montfort University

#Love Apparatus

Located at the Eastgate Entrance, Highcross Shopping Centre @apparatus_love Can apparatus love? We don’t know for sure, but surely they can say things about love! “#LoveApparatus” (@apparatus_love) is an art installation created for the ART-AI FESTIVAL, taking place Leicester between 30 April and 13 May 2018. #LoveApparatus delivers generative love text aphorisms that will be projected in Highcross Shopping Centre, Leicester, and posted to the twitter account “@apparatus_love”. Combining scrapping techniques, neural networks – using machine learning, an artificial intelligence technique – and a social network account, this art project delivers every 3 minutes a novel ‘love quote’ for its followers. The public can interact with the apparatus by tweeting using the hashtag “#LoveApparatus”. All public contributions are analysed by the algorithm to identify its level of ‘loveliness’, and the ones with a high score are fed into the network to generate future love quotes.

More about the artist here

The Kitty AI

It is year 2039. An artificial intelligence with the affective capacities of a kitten becomes the first non-human governor. She leads a politician-free zone with a network of Artificial Intelligences. She lives in mobile devices of the citizens and can love up to 3 Million people.

Excerpt from “The Kitty AI”:

“I was only 8 months old when all hell broke loose in West Eurasia. Well actually that makes 15 human years for a cat, so perhaps I wasn’t that young.

We were all terrified, man, woman, cat, dog, child, kitten, all of us. In hindsight, P-Crisis EMEA, was almost as terrifying as World War II, in that, its emotional impact on our collective consciousness was significant. At least to us millennials who have been very well isolated from concepts like scarcity and frugality – it was a shell shock.

We had experienced violence but mostly from video games or CGI heavy horror movies. We had experienced loss, but only when we lost our iPhones or broke up w/ our “swipe-right” girlfriends. We had experienced chaos, but only in our desktops or our bedrooms while looking for clean underwear amidst a vortex of scarcely worn outfits."

More about the artist here:

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