AI Performance Space
AI Performance Space is a platform for distributed artistic research operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence and performance art. Curated by artist and PhD researcher (Human-Centered Computing & AI Ethics) Mirabelle Jones, the site brings together artists of different practices, backgrounds, identities, locations and methods to collectively investigate the influence artificial intelligence can have on the creative process and consider how creative practices can in turn develop new insights and approaches to artificial intelligence. The platform arrives at a time when the presence of AI and machine learning technologies is rapidly increasing in our daily lives despite a lack of comprehensive public knowledge about the development, inner workings, and potential harms of these technologies. Drawing from state of the art research and development across sectors, AI Performance Space works at the intersection of academic, industry, artistic and public understandings of machine learning, creating a discourse that merges often disparate perspectives in the direction of greater public transparency and engagement. Launched during the COVID-19 global pandemic at a time when many performance artists have been financially impacted and unable to physically exhibit or perform their works, AI Performance Space offers a social distance-considerate alternative to a performance art festival, highlighting many works created by artists while in quarantine and providing a global platform for the creative exchange of works and ideas.
Embodying the Algorithm: New Movements in Natural Language Processing Performance Art Series
The premier project of AIPerformance.space Embodying the Algorithm: New Movements in Natural Language Processing Performance Art Series is now on view at AIPerformance.space. The virtual exhibition features the works of a group of interdisciplinary performance artists using OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language processing model to create performances where the role of AI and performer blur in the creation of collaborative endurance performances. The exhibition will be on view from 03.15.21 and full-length documentation of the performances is available for gallery exhibitions and film festivals. Please inquire here.
Embodying the Algorithm documents the works of a group of interdisciplinary performers from around the world working with artificial intelligence technology to produce unique performance-based artworks that challenge, complicate, and obfuscate the boundaries of human-computer creative practices. By working with the largest natural language processing model in existence OpenAI’s GPT-3, Embodying the Algorithm presents a body of works that are unprecedented explorations at the nexus of human creativity and machine learning, exploring and traversing the barrier between human and nonhuman consciousnesses to investigate questions of embodiment, expression, human-machine collaboration and creativity.
Performers
Chelsea Coon
Location: Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. Orig. USA
Chelsea Coon is an artist and writer whose work focuses on the shifting interconnections of the body, time, and space. She utilises endurance to reconsider limits of the body primarily through performance as well as installation, sculpture, painting, photography, video, and text. She has exhibited internationally in festivals, biennales, and galleries in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She received her BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2012), MFA at Tufts University (2014), and a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Theatre, Performance and Contemporary Live Arts at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Scuola Teatro Dimitri, Switzerland (2015). Recent writings will be included in Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan (Ohio State University Press, 2020); and the phenomenology of bloody performance art! (Routledge, under contract). She is the recipient of the Yousuf Karsh Prize in Photography, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, and the Australian Research Training Program Scholarship. Coon is a PhD candidate in practice-led research at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Mirabelle Jones
Location: Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Orig. USA
Mirabelle Jones is a queer, non-binary creative technologist, interdisciplinary artist, and researcher based in Copenhagen investigating critical, creative practices in technology. Their work explores the immersive storytelling potential of sensors, spatialized sound, LEDs, animatronics, XR, wearables, performance art, sculpture, artificial intelligence, natural language processing and computer vision. They are a PhD candidate at The University of Copenhagen in the Department of Computer Science (DIKU) within the Human-Centered Computing section investigating ethical AI through creative critical practice. They possess an M.F.A. in Book Art & Creative Writing from Mills College and a BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz. A proponent of STEAM education and interdisciplinary development, they are a frequent speaker on the subject of accessible, ethical, and feminist design practices. Their works have most recently been featured at Catch: Center for Art, Design, and Technology, ATA Gallery, the Museum Meermanno and the Center for Performance Research and appear in several collections including the One National Gay & Lesbian Archives and the Center on Contemporary Art’s historic Hear Our Voice collection.
Marissa Lynn
Location: Lives and Works in Los Angeles, CA USA
Marissa is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes, and often combines, performance, mixed and multi media, photography, and verse. She has little formal education in the arts, but her exploration in styles and mediums continuously ebbs and flows. The of the moment nature of photography has stuck with her throughout her career, coming through as her go-to way of expressing herself. Over the years, performance has become another favorite, creating a more direct and immediate connection with the viewer. Exploring rituals and traditions, communication through intimate interaction, and documentation of ephemera are recurring themes throughout her art making practice.
Rine Rodin
Location: Lives and Works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Orig. Sweden
http://www.nuleinn.net/rine-rodin
Emmett Palaima
Location: Lives and Works in Brooklyn, NY USA. Orig. USA
https://www.hammerheadaudio.com/art
Emmett Palaima (Hammerhead Audio) is an artist, musician, programmer, and electrical engineer, whose artwork focuses on the physicality of sound and celebration of the technical processes behind sound creation. He employs a variety of techniques to this end, including audio illusions, non-traditional methods of sound creation, and combination analog / digital signal flow systems. He additionally designs a variety of sound objects under the Hammerhead Audio moniker, including guitar pedals, synthesizers, techno-mystical triptychs, and motorized pocket shellfish.
Marcella Lucatelli
Location: Lives and Works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Orig. Brazil
https://www.marcelalucatelli.co/
Marcela Lucatelli can already be hailed as one of the most innovative vocalists and composers of her generation. Born in Brazil and based in Denmark, Marcela has earned international recognition for her extremely original, sensuous and politically charged performance works. The composer is known for writing ”scores for the limits of bodies and voice” (The Wire). Her pieces are currently performed by vocal elite groups such as the Danish National Vocal Ensemble and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, together with some of the most edgy ensembles and music collectives in the world, such as Apartment House (UK), Bastard Assignments (UK), Pinquins (NO) and Mocrep (US). Her works have been premiered at Donaueschinger Musiktage, Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Nordic Music Days, KLANG – Copenhagen Avantgarde Music Festival, SPOR Festival, Copenhagen Jazz Festival, DMA – Danish Music Awards, Ultima – Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, Borealis Festival, AllEars Festival for Improvised Music, Reykjavik Arts Festival, Waverly Project NYU, FILE – Electronic Language International Festival, Festival Novas Frequências, WOMEX, among other festivals and events worldwide. Her critically acclaimed first album PHEW! – The Last Guide for a Western Obituary shows her notorious vocal skills and conceptual irony, synthesized in groundbreaking contrasts and unclassifiable grooves. Lucatelli has been awarded the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Foundation Talent Prize in Composition 2019.
Leslie Foster
Location: Lives and Works in Los Angeles, CA USA. Orig. USA
https://www.lesliefoster.art/reel
Leslie Foster is an experimental filmmaker who has lived in Los Angeles for a decade. As an artist, he strives to create work that is beautiful and uncomfortable. His love for storytelling is inspired by a childhood spent in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. His desire is to create art that constantly challenges power structures, amplifies those whose voices are so often unheard, and quietly subverts in ways that are aesthetically powerful. He loves throwing tea parties in the gray areas. With over twelve years spent as a professional filmmaker, he is happiest when applying his knowledge in collaboration with other artists in order to tell unique stories. Much of his practice is rooted in community-building through art-making and collaboration. If he had to summarize his art practice in a single sentence, it would probably be, “I’m trying to praise the mutilated world and practice resurrection.” Somewhere in that collision of favorite poems by Adam Zagajewski and Wendell Berry is the frustrating, beautiful thing he’s trying to reach with his work. Since he graduated from Southern Adventist University in 2006, he’s shot music videos in Serbia, founded the 501(c)(3) Traveling Muse Pictures, spent five weeks undercover in Jamaica shooting a documentary about violent homophobia, gone to Burning Man eight times, and talked Vice Media into saying nice things about his art. His first solo gallery show “Ritual Cycle,” was created with designer and composer Scott Arany and filmmaker Heather Dappolonia, who together form the collective Nomad Solstice. “Ritual Cycle” debuted in March 2016, followed by a second solo installation, “59,” for which he shot 11 films in 11 months with 11 different collaborators, that debuted in May 2017. “59” represented the completion of a year-long art residency with the non-profit art collective Level Ground, where he now serves as the Director of Art Residency. Leslie is a founding member of the collective Museum Adjacent, which was formed by members of the 2019 Torrance Art Museum FORUM residency cohort. He’s currently pursuing an MFA in Design Media Arts at UCLA and is still trying to fulfill his life-long dream of running away with a band of sea-faring vagabond artists.
Gorjeoux Moon
Location: Lives and Works in Berlin, Germany. Orig. UK
https://www.instagram.com/gorjeouxpoetry
https://gorjeoux.myportfolio.com/
Dooley Murphy
Location: Lives and Works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Orig. UK
Dooley Murphy is a VR theorist and media artist currently concluding his doctoral research at the University of Copenhagen. Emphasizing the co-dependence and desirability of theory-based practice and practice-based theory, he takes a formalist approach to the design and analysis of interactive, immersive virtual environments. The culmination of his three-year Ph.D. project is an exploratory, almost manifesto-esque empirical account of what medium specificity might look like in ‘first-wave’ narrative VR artworks. His own VR practice seeks to counterbalance a perceived over-emphasis on participant agency and (often cynical definitions of) empathy in VR discourse and production. The Mediation of Violence and the Violence of Mediation (Atrocity Exhibition) (2016, ongoing), for instance, is a perceptually and affectively aggressive “news environment” that mock-innocently remediates so-called iconic images of physical and symbolic violence from historic and present-day photojournalism. The work explores and underscores VR’s pronounced but already-fading ability to imbue overly-familiar topics—issues and crises to which we’re unfortunately but perhaps self-preservingly desensitized—with a renewed sense of potency and poignancy. The atmospheres of overwhelmedness produced in and by Atrocity Exhibition and his other major VR artwork, Yorick (2017)—a belligerent lament delivered by a disgruntled “AI”—amount to a frank critique of the medium’s putative predisposition to sympathetic and often inadvertently Othering subject matter.