This was reading week so we had no lectures scheduled.
Visits
I visited the Creative Machine 2 exhibition at Goldsmiths. It was titled An exhibition exploring the twilight world between human and machine creativity and featured artists related to Goldsmiths and from CYLAND MediaArtLab.
The works I particularly liked were by Closed Loop by Jake Elwes which uses machine learning to automatically edit videos of interviews with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to just capture any part where they say numbers. The piece therefore is just a continuous stream of (mostly perhaps entirely) men saying numbers from zero to ten, but also many instances of millions, billions etc, which is very fitting with the inflated ideas that we hear about from Silicon Valley. It also is very reminiscent of The Clock which I blogged about in week 1, but instead of being painstaking edited by hand the of Christian Maclary the machine is doing the labour of editing automatically (albeit within a simpler domain of constraint), but the similarities are strong and it allows Jake to feed vast amounts of footage in to produce the effect.
I also really liked Memo Akten's work Deep Meditations. Memo was at the show and I spoke with him a for a while about the piece. If I understand correctly, the different pictures show the output from the AI as it moves within an abstract space of elements of images. So we might see a frame which has a series of mountain views, but it's the essence of the image that we are seeing through the AI's view, so some of the images might look very much like an mountain range, while others are just of a similar shape but the texture might be very different or the colours and tone might be similar. It's hard effect to describe in words but very mesmerising to see in person and beanbags were provided for people to take an extended gaze to the "mind" of this AI.