In recent years, events and certain uses of digital technologies have come to light that make me question the sustainability of our relationship with computers. Documentaries such as “The Great Hack” reveals corrupt digital campaign strategies used in the US election and how organistaions such as cambridge analytica exploit our personal data to target and manipulate us. We don’t realise how much information about our personal lives we reveal online. Our data profile can be bought and sold like a commodity which is why we start receiving personal advertisements or news articles on social media. It becomes painfully obvious with the introduction of devices such as Amazon Alexa or Google Home that there are devices meant to listen to and store our every word. However, this has been going on long before these technologies were introduced. Everyone carries a phone around with them. To quote Edward Snowden. “Citizens would rise up in outrage if the government mandated that every person carry a tracking device revealing their location and identity 24 hours a day. Yet in the last decade we have become, app by app, subject to just such a system.” This terrifies me and reminds me of an Orwellian dystopia. The power the digital enables the government and big corporations to have is too much. Stricter laws and sanctions and data protection acts need to be put in place. I think there is a special type of immorality with this as many people aren’t aware of what goes on and so ignorance becomes exploited. I imagine if we originally knew what data we were consenting to give when using the digital, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
It’s interesting how this can be related back to Deleuze’s societies of control.
We previously lived in societies of sovereignty ruled by feudal law under a king or queen however as we moved into the modern age, we became a “Society of Control” in which order is maintained through Hierarchical observation. This is the process by which people are hierarchically ranked with the purpose of observing one another. A significant function is carried out by just the thought you might be watched, you know the camera is there, whether or not someone is looking at the footage. This idea has perhaps only just become to be fully realised with digital surveillance technology. We are always being watched by our computers something we understand when we realise webcams can be hacked into. Focualt argues that within a society of control, power can be exercised much more effectively. It’s a power that’s only increased with the rise of governments usage of the digital.
This is a philosophical angle to contextualise the sustainability of the digital and the socio political regime it enforces. Whereas the government and big corporations utilise the digital to maintain order something we’ve become aware of through the likes of CIA whistle blower Edward Snowden who revealed just to what extent surveillance extends, technologies like Artificial Intelligence is encouraging the digital to take control of itself and transgress beyond human command.
For this project I’ve honed my question of sustainability within the digital around artificial intelligence. A concept first introduced to me in Kubrick’s “2001 a space Odyssey”. It’s amazing to me how far this presentation of an artificial intelligence pre-dated the technology. It shows that even the mere idea is a cause for concern.
Ai really interests me both regarding the technicalities behind it and what it’s used for. It’s something that you hear about a lot, but a topic that I don’t have much in depth knowledge on. I think the questions in regard to its implication on sustainability are expressed powerfully by Stephen Hawking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFLVyWBDTfo
I will go on to explore how I can use it in my project both as a technique but also point of discussion in my communication.
Sougwen Chung is an artist who uses AI guided robots to paint on large canvases. They respond to her movement and brush strokes in real time so a lot of her work is about the balance of the relationship between human and machine. She embraces the errors of the AI guided robots and adjusts her line to complement theirs, whilst they work off her.
“In my work as an artist and researcher, I explore AI and robotics to develop new processes for human creativity. For the past few years, I’ve made work alongside machines, data and emerging technologies. It’s part of a lifelong fascination about the dynamics of individuals and systems and all the messiness that that entails. It’s how I’m exploring questions about where AI ends and we begin and where I’m developing processes that investigate potential sensory mixes of the future. I think it’s where philosophy and technology intersect.”
She delves into the technicalities of her method as well which is good to know going forward for practical experiments. “I was really inspired by Stanford researcher Fei-Fei Li, who said, “if we want to teach machines how to think, we need to first teach them how to see.” She utilises an Ai and robotics technique called optical flow for her robots to have an acute awareness of spatial patterns. It’s made me aware of all the different things that the practice of ai can be used for.
Her work tells a narrative, is displays a balance. The machine – artificial intelligence is not taking over, it works in harmony with man. Through its purpose of making art it is humanised. It reflects a different narrative than we hear in the news it displays sustainability. Working to my brief – I would like to “generate a new method of communication and encourage a different kind of interpersonal digital interaction.” I feel the sensitivity in which Chung uses AI is really effective for this kind of message, it is displayed visually in her outcomes.
I previously looked at two artists who use AI in their working method which dictated their created visuals.
Refiki Anadol – Latent History
“Anadol uses his algorithms on datasets collected from the city archives to explore and re-imagine the hidden layers of Stockholm’s history. This will be a machine’s interpretation of information from the City of Stockholm’s archives, Stockholmskällan, and the Swedish National Heritage Board’s archive, K-samsök, also known as SOCH (Swedish Open Cultural Heritage). All of this data is then filtered through Anadol’s artistry, in which he is completely open to any outcome, depending on what the machines and their computing power have managed to do with this constant flow of information.”
https://www.fotografiska.com/sto/en/news/refik-anadol-latent-history/
Trevor Paglen – “From Apple to Anomoly”
Trevor Paglen presents printed images from ImageNet: one of the most widely shared, publicly available collection of images, which is also used to train artificial intelligence networks. ” In most cases, the connotations of image categories and names are uncontroversial i.e. a ‘strawberry’ or ‘orange’. Others are classified under ‘debtors’, ‘alcoholics’ and ‘bad persons’. These definitions, if used in AI, suggest a world in which machines will be able to elicit different forms of judgement against humankind.”
Paglen explains why these images envoke this stange feeling perhaps delving into the the uncanny – ‘Machine-seeing-for-machines is a ubiquitous phenomenon, encompassing everything from facial-recognition systems conducting automated biometric surveillance at airports to department stores intercepting customers’ mobile phone pings to create intricate maps of movements through the aisles. But all this seeing, all of these images, are essentially invisible to human eyes. These images aren’t meant for us; they’re meant to do things in the world; human eyes aren’t in the loop.’
https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/trevor-paglen-from-apple-to-anomaly
Both these artists utilise generative adversarial networks to create these collection of images in different ways. “A generative adversarial network is a class of machine learning systems invented by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in 2014. Two neural networks contest with each other in a game. Given a training set, this technique learns to generate new data with the same statistics as the training set”
This research has made me think, how I can use AI in my work, what (and how) does it communicate. I would like to employ AI techniques to see how it informs my graphic language and explore the process of generative design – creating the conditions and letting something else interact to infer the visual outcome. What I’ve looked at here is image based AI outcomes, but there’s a lot you can do with words as well. I’ve previously used AI that create a narrative through a simple text prompt. It’s trained with a data base of literature and picks up your language and vocabulary to continue the story from the inputted prompt.
It can be acessed here – https://talktotransformer.com/, and I used it briefly in my book project to look at the structure of a narrative and how this can be deconstructed. I took prompts from one of the oldest surviving written texts – Beowulf to see how this modern technology could reinterpret the story. I think the mistake and oddities the AI included created a poeticness to the piece of writing created and take some of the smooth humanness that something like a carefully written book has.
Other research points to inform my understanding of the question of digital sustainability and artificial intelligence:
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/heesun-seo-studio-hik-graphic-design-061219
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/double-click-december-2019-digital-031219
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-artificial-intelligence-gets-first-art-show/
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18272602/ai-art-generation-gan-nvidia-doodle-landscapes
Cameron Aitken Graphic Design 