AIAIA – Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa is an exhibition of creative work from my art-research into the role of emerging technologies in healthcare, as part of the Future Hospitals project at HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa at University of Cape Town. The show opened with work in progress on Wednesday 25 February, which will be developed over the course of the exhibition. I’m using the exhibition as a work space for the exhibition duration, interviewing collaborators and writing up work.
At the centre of the exhibition is the artwork Bone Flute, a 3D-printed replica of my femur, made into a flute. It is a collaboration with orthopaedic surgeon Rudolph Venter, in the Division of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University, and flute player, composer and improviser Alessandro Gigli. The work is accompanied by a short film made by film-maker Dara Kell. Thanks to Bernard Swart at CranioTech for producing the 3D print of my femur.
I read an article in The Guardian newspaper recently about an AI visual identification system called Clip that was fooled into misidentifying images by the application of text signs. The example they gave was an apple that had a sticky note attached reading ‘iPod’, which, as the article has it, made the AI decide “that it is looking at a mid-00s piece of consumer electronics” (ie. an iPod). The makers of Clip, Open AI, call this a “typographic attack”.
“We believe attacks such as those described above are far from simply an academic concern,” the organisation said in a paper published this week. “By exploiting the model’s ability to read text robustly, we find that even photographs of handwritten text can often fool the model. This attack works in the wild … but it requires no more technology than pen and paper.”
I was immediately reminded of an episode in one of my favourite comic book series, The Invisibles by Grant Morrison. In the series ‘Entropy in the U.K.’ (1996) the leader of The Invisibles, agents of chaos, freedom and revolution (the good guys), King Mob, is captured and tortured by the forces of the Establishment, order and evil (the bad guys, boo!). He is injected with a drug that interferes with his perceptions, so that when he is shown a written word, he sees the object it refers to – hence this horrifying scene in which he sees his severed fingers displayed to him.
The drug scrambles perceptual information reaching the secondary visual cortex. It makes him unable to tell the difference between the word describing the object and the object itself…
‘Entropy in the UK’ in THE INVISIBLES, Grant Morrison, 1996
Morrison, one of the brilliant wave of comic book artists in the 1980s and ’90s that include Neil Gaiman and of course Alan Moore, is playing with ideas from semiotics and surrealism, which is what the recent AI attack reminded me of too – it’s a literalisation of the artistic provocation in Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, with its famous text ‘Ceci n’est pas un pipe’. For Clip, and for poor King Mob (don’t worry, he mounts a spectacular psychic defence and escapes) the text of ‘pipe’ is a pipe. As Open AI puts it:
We’ve discovered neurons in CLIP that respond to the same concept whether presented literally, symbolically, or conceptually.
While this might seem freaky that an AI’s behaviour should seem to express such human artistic and cultural ideas as semiotics, it’s probably not freaky so much as a reminder that AIs are programmed by humans and so reflect our perceptual limits. It does still seem to suggest to me the veracity of artistic ways of understanding perception – and of course the brilliance of comic books 😉 – but maybe that’s just to do again with the fact that AIs are a reflection of us.
Something worth noting though, is that the company that makes Clip also studies it to learn how it works. As their quote above makes clear, in AIs like this, researchers don’t necessarily understand how it works, because what they programme is a network or a system of nodes, which is trained on vast amounts of data, and starts to output results. The system learns from reactions to its data output – after a certain point, it is trained, rather than programmed. I’m at a very early stage in researching current AI, and writing this post very loosely, so please forgive my rudimentary explanation here – my main intention here is to mark out some loose creative connections, for further research…
On the Australian Gertrude Contemporary gallery mailing list (still subscribed from visiting Australia in 2006 for my piece Sideshow) there’s mention of an interesting-sounding academic, Dr James Parker, who lectures in law with a special interest in sound – he also has a radio show and writes on music.
Today I led a group of students on a walking tour taking in examples of public art and design, and other sites of interest in Cape Town. We started the walk with a psychogeographic quote by Michel de Certeau from ‘Writing the City’ in ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ (1984):
The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.
The course the students were on is SIT’s IHP Cities in the 21st Century: People, Planning, and Politics, which “examines the intentional and natural forces that guide the development of the world’s cities. It combines an innovative urban studies academic curriculum with fieldwork involving public agencies, planners, elected officials, NGOs, and grassroots groups in important world cities where exciting changes are taking place”.
This is a rough map of the course we took (still struggling with Google’s interface).
And these are some of the sites we visited:
Brett Murray’s ‘Africa’ 2000
Cape Craft and Design Institute curated artworks from the 2010 World Cup
Egon Tania’s sculptures on Pier Place
Greenpoint Park
John Skotnes’s sculpture Mythological Landscape (1994) on Thibault Square
The Prestwich Memorial
The iconic children’s jungle gym in the form of a Voortrekker Wagon, Sea Point
The SA National Gallery
It’s really not that big!
Mark O’Donovan’s ‘Manenberg’ interactive street sculpture
I’ve been working with the Princess Vlei Forum as part of my postdoc and wider work. The PVF is running a campaign to save a lake and wetland in the Cape Flats from a shopping mall development – they want to keep it public land, and develop it as a ‘people’s park’. As one of the strings to their bow in their campaign to save the Princess, the PVF entered their plans for alternative development on the site to World Design Capital 2014 for recognition – you can download their WDC2014 submission, which has been shortlisted.
As a contribution to imagining what shape some of the elements of the park could take, I worked with design company ThingKing on an entry to the competition PlayScapes in August 2013, commissioned by the Princess Vlei Forum. We developed the idea of four interrelated installations on the site, playing on the idea of the archetypal ‘4 elements’ (air, water, earth, fire). For fire we designed a communal story-telling fire site; for earth a playground incorporating planting; for air a wind-activated sound sculpture and climbing frame; and for water we suggested options from a floating bird habitat island to baptism facilities (church groups use the lake for ceremonies).
Oddveig Nicole Sarmiento and Rike Sitas, Jenny Fatou-Mbaye (chairing) during their presentation at ‘Thinking the City’
Last week, from Tues 12 – Fri 15 March, the Public Culture City Lab at ACC, of which I am a part, staged a series of panel discussions around notions of art and culture in public space, and the ‘creative city’. The series, ‘Thinking the City’, was intended to complement the annual event series ‘Infecting the City‘, which hosts creative projects in public space in Cape Town over a week.
Cape Town has a long history of public art and culture, and has more recently embraced the notion of a ‘creative city’. This is an exciting prospect for creative practitioners, yet the question of ‘creative city for whom?’ keeps bubbling to the surface of public debate, as different interest groups lay claim to the creative expression in, and of, public space. Thinking the City will contribute to the Infecting the City programme by unpacking a series of examples and contested territories related to cultural practice in the city, in order to foster a more critical dialogue about creative practice in public space. It will comprise four presentation and discussion sessions.
The panel I contributed to, alongside Jenny Fatou-Mbaye, with Ismail Farouk chairing, was titled ‘Design and the Creative City: the creative city for whom?’. I looked at a number of creative art/design interventions in Cape Town, asking who they catered to, and raised the idea that the terms ‘public’ and ‘community’ can sometimes be in tension with each other in such projects.
GIPCA has uploaded video documentation of the panel, below. Unfortunately my presentation slides are not included in the video, but you could download my presentation as a pdf and view the images along with the video – design and the creative city.pdf
The artist Olafur Eliasson, known for his large scale installations, has produced a solar-powered lamp for use in the developing world. Titled Little Sun, Eliasson produced the lamp in collaboration with engineer Frederik Ottesen. It is an example of work by artists, such as Marjetica Potrc, related to design for the developing world – though Eliasson might be fairly unique here in designing an actual mass-produced product for real use.
Little Sun
The project has a high-level art world presence – it will, the Guardian tells us, be used in the surrealism rooms of the Tate Modern in 2012, ‘which will be plunged into darkness after normal opening hours, and visitors invited to visit them by the light of Little Sun lamps’. They will also be for sale in the Tate store.
Explaining why he had developed a social project, the Berlin-based Danish artist said: “Art is always interested in society in all kinds of abstract ways, though this has a very explicit social component. The art world sometimes lives in a closed-off world of art institutions, but I still think there’s a lot of work to show that art can deal with social issues very directly.”
The fact that the lamp – with its cheery petalled face – had been designed by an artist was important, he said. “People want beautiful things in their lives; they want something that they can use with pride … everyone wants something that’s not just about functionality but also spirituality.”
Interested too in the mention of Eliasson’s cancelled Olympic project in the same article:
Little Sun, as the lamp is called, has risen out of the ashes of Eliasson’s Cultural Olympiad project, Take a Deep Breath, which the Olympic Lottery Distributor (OLD) declined to fund after details of the proposal were leaked to a newspaper. The project would have asked participants to inhale and exhale on behalf of a cause or idea, and then capture the thought on a “breath bubble” on a website. The “negative publicity” showed that the work was “contentious”, found the OLD’s board, according to its March 2012 minutes, and they “struggled to justify the £1m sought”.
