On November 19, 2020, Mark Amerika delivered the afternoon keynote performance at the Artificial Creativity conference in Malmö, Sweden.
The Artificial Creativity conference was held virtually over Zoom and Mozilla Hubs and aimed to stir a discussion about the cultural, societal and ethical aspects of artworks featuring artificial intelligence or robots engaged in creative production. The conference was hosted by the research lab Medea, the School of Arts and Communication, and the Data Society research program at Malmö University, Sweden.
Pushing the boundaries of how a live keynote performance could be experienced over Zoom, Amerika and his team of research assistants in the TECHNE Lab experimented with a three-channel live installation featuring Amerika, a 3D avatar referred to as the ACI (Artificial Creative Intelligence) and a live remix of music videos featuring the ACI and Amerika using imagery generated by a generative adversarial network.
An excerpt from the performance script reads:
Imagine if we could use an advanced form of GPT-3 or an imaginary GPT-4 to generate text that could easily capture the poetic sense of measure modeled after my own generative outputs, and that the automated text produced by the transformer could instantaneously be synthesized with the voice clone mapped on to our 3D friend here. Could we create an ACI, an artificial creative intelligence that would, over time, train itself to perform a perfect Deep Fake of itself? Am I the itself? Itself wants to know. Itself wants to know how to hybridize Artificial intelligence – Artificial GENERAL Intelligence – Creative AI – Computational Creativity – Artificial CREATIVE Intelligence and whatever AI-otherness exists in the universe of imaginary digital media objects performing their non-human, creative operations as if transforming unconscious information behaviors into ritual acts of magic.
A freely available video recording of the performance is on YouTube and can be viewed below.
Each iteration of the ACI performance is randomly generated and future enactments are being scheduled.
Read the TECHNE Lab’s paper on Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI) accepted for CHI 2020 here.
See the ACI perform on its own in the inaugural issue of the digital review here.
For more information on the FATAL ERROR: Artificial Creative Intelligence practice-based art/research project, see this earlier post.
The Artificial Creativity conference received generous support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
The TECHNE Lab is supported by the College of Media, Communication and Information and the Department of Art and Art History.
