Presenting The New Real: Uncanny Machines Talks featuring five inspirational artistic projects
As part of the 2023 Scottish AI Summit The New Real announces five inspirational AI Artists who have been funded to explore the uncanny interplay of humans and machines, and the social implications of recent developments in AI. In 2023, The New Real is working with five artists to illuminate the ways emerging technology impacts on life at a profound level.
Image credit: L-R (top): an archive image from Kasia Molga; an image from Alice Bucknell’s Cones of Uncertainty. L-R (bottom): images by Sarah Cistion generated using Craiyon
Each artist has been awarded a The New Real 2023 Development Grant which enables the artists to each investigate the entanglements of people, data, machines and environments and to develop multi-sensory exploration of possible futures. Each of the five artists tackle an urgent challenge for our times: grappling with the implications of artificial superintelligence; community-centred approaches to machine learning; giving voice to unheard voices in historic data; sensing lost loved ones in small datasets; and breaking open the 'black box' of AI.
As part of this year’s Scottish AI Summit each artist will present an inspirational talk on the ways artists can push creative boundaries with AI, and how AI can be enriched or challenged by the Arts. The winner of the full Art Commission will be announced in March 2023.
PROJECTS
About The New Real
Artists are pushing at the boundaries of human-machine creativity to generate works that combine machine learning methods with human intuition and embodied experience and discover features that are not in the data.
In The New Real, our idea is to provide artists accessible tools to directly manipulate a model, in order to enable profound artistic experiments with AI. We believe this can lead to better art, and also provides a basis to probe and question urgent issues of today. We are interested in transformative experiences for audiences fuelled by AI, and works that address key challenges in AI, such as authorship, harmful bias or misinformation.
The New Real 2023 AI Art Commission is a partnership between The New Real at University of Edinburgh, Scottish AI Alliance, Alan Turing Institute and The British Library.
Speaker: Professor Drew Hemment, Director of The New Real
Professor Drew Hemment is The New Real’s founder and principal investigator. Drew is an artist, designer and academic researcher, who over 25 years has been one of the key figures who has shaped the field of digital art and culture. He is Professor of Data Arts and Society, Chancellors Fellow and Director of Festival Futures at Edinburgh Futures Institute and Edinburgh College of Art within University of Edinburgh. He presently leads The New Real and Experiential AI in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute and Edinburgh's Festivals, supporting significant new artistic works, and exploring new paradigms for creative, fair and inclusive AI.
Drew has worked with cities and nations representing culture and research at the highest level, and worked for the Singapore Government on Smart Nation and Singapore’s 50th anniversary. In 1995, he founded FutureEverything, named by The Guardian one of the top ten ideas festivals in the world. In 2016, he founded the GROW Observatory, the world’s first continental scale citizens’ observatory. His work has been covered by New York Times, BBC and NBC and recognised by awards from the cultural, technology and public service sectors. Awarded a PhD at Lancaster University in 1999, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in 2009, and elected a Turing Fellow in 2021.