Artificial Atmospheres and Unexpected Media: Exploring Media Art and Machine Learning

16–17 October 2024
NOVA University Lisbon

Technology shapes our sensory experiences and extends our cognitive and bodily capabilities. Its pervasive influence coupled with the ever-expanding reach of artificial intelligence across diverse facets of society underscores the urgent need for comprehensive exploration, experimentation, and discussion. Machine learning advancements, while offering unprecedented tools and opportunities, also raises profound ethical dilemmas, blurring the boundaries between reality and artificiality. It is urgent that this technology be explored and experimented with and discussed from various angles.

This conference seeks to explore the intricate relationship between artistic expression and emerging media technologies, particularly focusing on machine learning and virtual environments. By scrutinizing this alliance, our aim is to unpack the myriad challenges and novel responses it presents to contemporary issues spanning ethical, social, political, and economic domains. The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence elicits a spectrum of reactions, ranging from utopian optimism to dystopian apprehension. Generative AI programs can be a useful tool for the artist, and simultaneously a threat to creative careers. Algorithmic technologies have the potential for AI models to generate creative content, or for creative users to generate “collaborations” with machines, such as transhumanist art, reflecting the ideas of Marshall McLuhan that technology is extending human bodies, reflecting a proactive vision of the future while attempting to address both the positive and negative impacts on society. We aim to delve into the creative intersections of media art, immersive technologies and virtual environments, and machine learning through the creative lens of the artist.

What virtues might survive or thrive in our art worlds through these changes?
What virtues may be retained and strengthened through artistic interventions and explorations of these changes?

Keynote Speaker

DANIEL CHÁVEZ HERAS is a lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He specialises in the computational production and analysis of visual culture. His research combines critical frameworks in the history and theories of cinema, television, and photography, with advanced technical practice in creative and scientific computing, including applied machine learning technologies. Daniel has worked extensively in interdisciplinary design and creative industries, in Mexico and in the UK, with cultural institutions such as the British Council and the BBC. He is an affiliate of King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, part of the Computational Humanities Group, and a member of the Creative AI Lab, in partnership with the Serpentine Galleries in London. His newest book is Cinema and Machine Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Aesthetics and Spectatorship, from Edinburgh University Press.

Invited Speakers/Artists

PABLO NÚÑEZ PALMA is an experimental filmmaker and independent researcher whose work investigates the intersection of new technologies with audiovisual archives. His latest projects seek to harness generative AI to support creative processes and explore ethical forms of human-machine co-authorship.

JAN BOT is a filmmaking bot that combines archival footage and algorithms to generate experimental videos based on two ingredients: found footage and today’s trending topics. Jan Bot was an artificial intelligence programme created by artists Bram Loogman and Pablo Núñez Palma in collaboration with Eye Filmmuseum and support from the Netherlands Creative Industries Fund. Using some of the latest A.I. of its time, Jan Bot worked day and night producing poetic films inspired by current news and images from early cinema.

REBECCA BARON is a Los Angeles-based media artist known for her lyrical essay films which explore the construction of history, with a particular interest in still photography and its relationship to the moving image. Her work has screened widely at international film festivals and media venues including documenta 12, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, Toronto Film Festival, London Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty Film Seminar, Viennale and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films have received awards at the San Francisco, Black Maria, Montreal, Leipzig, Athens, Onion City, KIN, Sinking Creek and Ann Arbor Film Festivals. She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has taught documentary and experimental film at Massachusetts College of Art, Harvard University, and since 2000 at California Institute of the Arts. Early adopter. Web pioneer. Connoisseur of emerging technologies. Appreciator of systems. Collector of analog devices. Teacher of technology, high and low.

DOUGLAS GOODWIN is a technologist investigating the mechanisms by which language and other technologies mediate our perception of reality. Goodwin’s work has shown at many venues including the Toronto International Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, Ambulante, London Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Frankfurt Film Museum, SIGGRAPH, REDCAT, the Orphans Film Symposium, the Courtisane Festival, Eyebeam, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. “Lossless”, a collaboration with Rebeca Baron, was the first digital work to enter the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. He currently serves as the first Fletcher Jones Foundation Scholar in Computation and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Scripps College.

BUDHADITYA CHATTOPADHYAY is an artist, media practitioner, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, creative technologies and research, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of environment and ecology, migration, race and decoloniality. Chattopadhyay has received numerous residencies, fellowships, and international awards, e.g. PRIX Ars Electronica 2011, Computer Space Festival 2014, Confluence 2021. His works have been widely exhibited, performed or presented across the globe, and released by Gruenrekorder (DE) and Touch (UK). Chattopadhyay has an expansive body of scholarly publications in the areas of media art history, theory and aesthetics, cinema and sound studies in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of four books including The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), and Between the Headphones (2021). Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, and an MA in New Media from the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University.

JOEL KRUEGER* is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He works in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive science: specifically, issues in 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognition, including emotions, social cognition, loneliness, and psychopathology. He also writes about comparative philosophy and philosophy of music. He is an Associate Editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences and Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE).

*by special invitation and support from the exploratory research project GENAI.

Programme

Full programme here. Presenter biographies here.

Location

Colégio Almada Negreiros (Campus Campolide) – map

NOVA FCSH (Campus Berna) – map

To join the sessions on Zoom, click here.

Conference organisers: Patrícia Castello Branco (CineLab — IFILNOVA); Maile Colbert (CineLab — IFILNOVA).

About IFILNOVA/CineLab’s working group in Art and Technology:
The Art and Technology working group focuses on exploring the relationships between artistic practices and the development of new technologies. Its main aim is to critically analyze, assess and discuss the ways the alliance between art and technology poses new challenges and offers new ways to respond to contemporary issues related to social, political, and economic paradigms, such as social justice, ecological sustainability, and economic development.

Event supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science under the projects UIDB/00183/2020 and UIDP/00183/2020, and by NOVA FCSH within the scope of the ArgLab exploratory research project “(GENAI) Ensuring Human Cognitive Flourishing against the background of GENerative AI: sustaining deep minds within our new cognitive ecology”.