Performing AI. On Techno-Human Entanglements

With the artists: Diana Serbanescu, Michael Straeubig, and the computer scientists: Heidrun Allert, Corinna Bath Host: Martina Leeker

Topic and Interest:

Devices equipped with AI, being able to collect data and process them with algorithms, are building our cultures in a large sense, namely: our conditions of life. They define what we are addressing, or what we know and understand by choosing and sorting data. They configure how we communicate, and how we organize society, economy, and politics. This power makes, that technical things and humans are today interdependently entangled; it is about so-called techno-human agencies, or assemblages. It is obvious that it becomes essential to understand how AIs function, which agencies they have - or which we attach to them discursively -, and which agency and influence humans have. Therefore our episode on: Performing AI asks for the – operative - performances of AI and how these perform humans, and vice versa, how humans make AI perform, and perform it.

An import field to go more deeply and concretely into “Performing AI” is firstly biased programming, dealing with the prejudices, which humans put into algorithmic processing, what leads to discrimination and segregation. The second domain for studying “Performing AI” are the Arts, as they play around with AI, looking for the options of resistance and intervention, unfolding human agencies in the situation of being performed by AI, and looking for other, more equal models of AI and techno-human agencies.

We invited artist/performers, and researchers, who are specialists in dealing with these negotiations of Performing AI in biases, going for more equal techno-human entanglements, and researching artistic methods.

 

Further Links:

Diana Serbanescu

Background in computer science and performing arts. Team lead of the research group „Criticality of Artificial Intelligence“ at Weizenbaum-Institut.
Co-Founder of „Replica“. Website at Weizenbaum Institute: 
Replica

Michael Straeubig

Systems Theory and Practice Website: straeubig.com
Essays: https://straeubig.medium.com/
Regie: KI trailer 
Laboria Cuboniks
Michael Kirby, On Acting and Not-Acting
Michael Mateas, Expressive AI
Ulf Otto, Algorithmen des Theaters
System Research Ltd and Theatre Workshop (Joan Littlewood, Gordon Pask): Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre

Heidrun Allert

Heidrun Allert (female) is a full professor for media education and educational computer science at Kiel University (CAU).
Website at University
Talk

Corinna Bath

"Maria-Goeppert-Mayer" ("MGM") professorship for "Gender, Technology and Mobility" at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences.
Website at University
An article