SYMPOSIUM
STATE OF INTERIM – Day 2
Over the course of three days the STATE OF INTERIM-Symposium
brought together young and interdisciplinary positions on the intersection of AI and art discourse.
by Kaeur Studio Editorial Team
Under the title "Positions on forms of prospective AI" Studio Kaeur presented ten artists and research talks with a diverse and international panel of young professionals working in the fields of art, design, coding, academia and education. The symposium was funded by the HFBK Hamburg.
This blog post highlights the second day of the symposium and the incredible people who joint us to speak about their work, interests, struggles and plans for the future. The second day presented:
Nadja Marcin "From SOPHYGRAY to computer woman
& Ariana Dongus – when the bot is human"
Till Langschied "Techno-Psychotic Densities"
All talks and lectures are recorded and available via the Kaeur Studio YouTube page. There will be also a publication in text form of the results of the symposium. The video documentation of the second and third day will also be released soon. Join our mailing list or follow @kaeur.studio on instagram to stay up to date!
The second day focussed on the role of the artists and continued notions of the intersection of research and practice from day one.
Nadja Marcin and Ariana Dongus talk focusses on the role of female bodies and workforce in the computing power discourse. During the pandemic, global households relied on compliant digital service assistants like Alexa or Siri to meet the growing demands of a privileged consumer class to deliver groceries, to-go orders, and produce - equating subservience with a feminine character. In response, the feminist audio bot #SOPHYGRAY (2021-2023) was created with groundbreaking excerpts from Bell Hooks, Donna Haraway, Silvia Federici, Audre Lorde, and Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing (+) that amusingly and philosophically refute the gendered expectations of service bots.As ways of working are currently being reevaluated around the world, this work critically and humorously examines the ideological implications of female voices in VA technology. Symbolically, "Sophy" asks, "What would it look like if we rewired the modus operandi of all service apps?" "Sophy's" presentation is followed by scholar Ariana Dongus' outline of the historically important role of women and their labor practices in the development of computing technologies - during the Industrial Revolution, during World War II, and in the first mainframe computer, ENIAC, in the United States. It draws attention to the mechanization of female head labor and gender relations-female and proletarian head labor as part of the origins of why software and high performance computers like smartphones exist today as well as then.
Till Langschied presented his video work "Techno-Psychotic Densities" which hypothesizes if a digital consciousness could emerge from the depth of old data clusters. The video animation depicts a sort of primeval soup in which vintage GIFs give birth to a new form of life. Beyond this, the presentation introduced the exhibition “X Ægen- c A-21 - New Mutations within Technopsychotic Densities”, including references to the installation by Handberg x Abersold from the same show. With these modes of emergence of digital consciousness in mind, the talk led to the relevance of archives and data sets in training neural networks, that (in a mix of hope and delusion) we call intelligent.
STATE OF INTERIM was curated and hosted by Kaeur Studio.
