[Music]
I’m an artist and I use technology as an
artistic medium to explore how it is
that we think about now in the future I
believe the arts practice and technology
are a powerful combination because they
can help us to explore critical issues
like artificial intelligence global
warming and genetic surveillance today I
want to share with you some of my
projects and I want to share some of the
projects of a community that’s been
emerging in New York of artists and
technologists who are dealing with these
types of issues to get started I’m gonna
tell you about my art practice and to do
that I’m gonna tell you about my health
in 2014 I was diagnosed with type 1
diabetes and that means that I had to
start thinking very carefully about my
blood glucose levels and injecting
insulin very frequently I started
wearing a body sensor which broadcast my
blood glucose values over a radio signal
to my phone and I stitched this together
with some open-source tools called X
trip and night scout and I was able to
get a real-time body feed to this art
installation which is a visualization
which represents what those numbers mean
to me numbers like 91 represent a good
and a healthy state very low values like
53 are potentially dangerous and in this
situation I can feel heartbeat sweating
shaking and so on higher numbers cause a
constriction in the flow of the
animation now higher values don’t cause
me any immediate symptoms but lots of
high numbers over time will accrue and
they cause a variety of body-wide
complications
including heart attack stroke blindness
amputation the list is long and the list
is very gruesome so the effects on me is
psychological I spend a lot of energy
and time trying to keep the numbers in a
healthy range I know that with this very
personal condition that I live with I
have to acknowledge it in order to deal
with it in order to survive
but then I realized all of us
collectively have a very similar
condition and it’s just as bad it’s just
as urgent and it’s just as
life-threatening and that’s climate
change
[Music]
I created this installation to help us
think about our global reaction to
climate change and to compare it to our
personal reactions when we’re diagnosed
with chronic illnesses ourselves there’s
something about how big and how
all-encompassing climate change is where
we say yes it’s urgent
yes it’s existential but then we allow
it to slip down in our priority list I
and people with diabetes we respond
differently we want to learn about it we
want to act on it and we want to put it
very high on the list the American
Diabetes Association publishes this
graphic on their website and it’s
designed to help newly diagnosed people
think about their options going forward
it charts the path of two fictional
characters Anna and Mary throughout
their lives and the colored dots
represent the sense of fear and of shock
and of anger and of stress whereas the
white dots represent a sense of control
you can see how these things change over
time for the two characters the key
insight is if like Mary you acknowledge
the condition early if you front-load
your engagement with the treatment
before the major symptoms start to show
then there’s good news you can live a
long and a healthy life it’s actually a
highly positive message because it shows
that you can take looming existential
threats that are actually very scary and
you can take control of them and you can
turn them into dust I want you to
imagine for a moment that you have been
diagnosed with diabetes and you’ve been
handed this child how long would you
wait to start treatment one year two
years would you begin immediately how
many hours of your day would you spend
on managing the condition how much money
would you spend where would it sit on
your priority list so here’s the thing
if you take global climate change that
situation overlays exactly onto this
chart and we as a species are already
halfway down on Anna’s trajectory there
is still time we could make a positive
leap over to Mary’s trajectory but we
need a big push from all of us to make
something like that happen and we would
need it very very quickly so you can see
what I’m doing here is I’m using
and technology to explore what the
future holds and to look at how we think
about the future I first moved to New
York in 2012 and one of the first works
I made was an audio-visual installation
called long
[Music]
[Music]
so in this work I’m using projection to
look at our perception of nature and in
this case of rocks and I’m asking can we
modify our fundamental conceptions of
these objects that we would normally
consider to be lifeless and bring a
sense of agency and movement this clip
of the process behind that shows that
I’m drawing light directly onto the
rocks and for me this is an early
example of me using art and technology
to think about our perceptions of the
world in this next project I’m exploring
depth video and this is an incredible
technology because you can shoot scenes
from one position and then you can re
render the scene from any other position
including from behind a wall this was
shot in the winding tunnels of the
London Underground and here we can see
that I’m using art and technology to
explore how we conceive of the built
urban environment of mass cities and to
think about this paradox of how being
surrounded by millions of people can
actually still be very isolating it was
while I was working on that project that
I met the artist and curator Ellen
Perlman and she was studying the same
depth technology and we started running
these workshops and events together to
support the community that built around
it Ellen then came and helped us out to
build a vibrant community around the
hardware Hat Club which is a weekly
meter run out of the New York office of
a global technology consultancy called
thought works the lab provides community
access to hardware including Virtual
Reality body sensors electronics
equipment and so on and this is become a
hub in New York for creative
collaboration following on from that we
founded our to hack and this was Ellen’s
idea of a program where we curate teams
based on an open call for applications
and then we match people together with
mixed disciplines and then we incubate
art lead explorations into various
emerging technologies again this is run
out of foot works New York and it’s done
in collaboration with a number of other
institutions like New York University
the Metropolitan Museum Media Lab
Microsoft and others
our alumni from this program have gone
on to show work at MoMA and at the
Tribeca Film Festival and and I’m not
kidding here at the North Pole Ellen has
made her own arts practice and she’s
looked in detail of brain-computer
interface which is headsets that can
read your brain state Ellen went on to
develop the world’s first brain opera at
a 360 degree theater in Hong Kong in the
Opera a performer wears a brain-computer
headset
it reads her emotional state those
emotions drive the colors and the sounds
and the videos the audience experience
nor is the name of a female British
secret agent who was dropped behind
enemy lines during World War two until
she was captured imprisoned and executed
she was very successful relaying
messages back to Britain by telling the
story through the lens of World War two
Ellen’s asking us to think about the
possibilities when this type of
technology gets into the hands of
authoritarian regimes she’s asking is
there a place in human consciousness
where surveillance cannot go so this is
another example of art and technology
questioning and critiquing a trajectory
that we’re on and you can see this with
my practice and with Ellen’s practice
and with the community programs after
hack and hardware hacker then Ellen and
I got together and we decided to take it
one step further we created a funded
arts residency based out of thought
works which supports artists who are
working with emerging technologies and
looking at the implications of those
technologies for society
you see I and many technologists that
thought works are thinking very deeply
about these types of issues and about
the future of technology and society and
where the residency we could now go much
deeper and we could have collaborations
between artists and the designers and
the developers at ThoughtWorks
the first residents we work with with a
cyborg foundation and this is Neil
Harbison and moon rebus their work is
about transhumanism and this is the
augmentation of human capabilities with
emerging technologies neil is known for
a surgical implant in his head
and if an antenna which allows him to
hear colors as sound he has a camera at
the front of the antenna and the color
frequencies from that camera are
translated into audio frequencies which
he can hear moon reboost has an implant
in her arm and this allows her to feel
whenever there’s seismic activity
anywhere in the world she’s a dancer and
a choreographer and she uses that
sensation in her performances one of the
key insights of the sidewalk foundation
is the permanent implants or permanently
worn wearables in effect become new
human senses over time the psychology of
the wearer adapts to the incoming data
stream which is always on and this
becomes another sense just like sight
and sound and smell and so on I and the
engineers from this community and the
footworks
employees collaborated with the cyborgs
on the development of two new sensors
with Neil we created a time sense which
allows him to perceive the 24-hour clock
around the circumference of his head
what he wants to do is to develop his
psychological awareness of this sense
and make it part of his internal
experience and then to adapt him to move
his sensation of time so that it goes
faster and it go slower moon has created
a new version of her seismic sense and
this one allows her to geolocate
tremors so that she can sense where they
are in the world and this is something
that’s going to give her a chance to
become much more in sync with the
movements of the planet
the futures suggested by this work are
startling with an internet-enabled sense
like moon’s seismic sense any data feed
from the internet can potentially become
your internalized bodily sensation what
are the implications of that as our
children grow up in a world where these
types of augmentations are available to
those that can afford it and providing
advantages to those that can afford it
what are going to be the social
pressures or the work pressures to
conform towards cyborg ISM again this is
an example of arts practice which
provokes thought and dialogue about an
emerging future
our next class resident was Heather
Dewey Hogg book and she’s known for
collecting discarded gum and cigarette
butts and extracting DNA from them she
takes them to a gene sequencing lab and
she 3d prints faces based on the traits
from that DNA you can see some examples
in a gallery setting up here during the
residency Heather collaborated with the
venn incarcerated whistleblower Chelsea
Manning and with the thought works
designer Shirley Conan go and she
produced this comic book which helps
bring this very important conversation
towards the general audience what’s
fascinating here is that shortly after
Heather started printing these faces an
industry emerged around it and vendors
started offering this as a service if
you give me some DNA I’ll give you a
face DNA analysis is getting cheaper all
of the time and everywhere we go we
leave a trail of DNA and so this raises
interesting questions about genetic
privacy and genetic surveillance and
also about bias the artificial
intelligence systems used to generate
these faces are trained on datasets
related to human conventions about race
gender and identity not scientific
models then this is how artificial
intelligence works it learns about how
humans do things and then it mimics that
that’s being alluded to in the second
pain here and artificial intelligence
like this is being rolled out across
society right now and it’s making
consequential decisions for people’s
lives including things like loan
applications or criminal sentencing
there’s significant evidence that these
systems are often learning and
automating human biases in algorithmic
form at scale and that’s something that
the designers and the users of these
systems don’t actually intend but it is
happening in practice and that’s why
with the arts residency we have an open
call out right now for an artist that
wants to go deeper into the biases of
artificial intelligence during the fall
of 2017 once again with Heather’s work
and with the residency generally we see
art practice and technology tools
helping to critique an emerging future
as an artist myself looking at personal
health and a climate change and as a
director of these programs I know that
looking into the future can be scary
there are all these unknowns and there
are all these risks but this is
somewhere where art can step in and it
can help us in an entirely unique way
whether its climate change or cyborg ism
or biased AI or DNA or brain
surveillance artists are helping us go
deep with these issues and to see them
in a new light and to understand these
amazing new ideas in a tangible way
right in front of us this helps us to
see and discuss the risks and the
opportunities and to put them into
context and that enables us to take
control of very difficult issues so this
is why I believe that bringing arts
practice much deeper into technology is
going to be crucial for the 21st century
thank you
[Applause]
you
[Music]
I’m an artist and I use technology as an
artistic medium to explore how it is
that we think about now in the future I
believe the arts practice and technology
are a powerful combination because they
can help us to explore critical issues
like artificial intelligence global
warming and genetic surveillance today I
want to share with you some of my
projects and I want to share some of the
projects of a community that’s been
emerging in New York of artists and
technologists who are dealing with these
types of issues to get started I’m gonna
tell you about my art practice and to do
that I’m gonna tell you about my health
in 2014 I was diagnosed with type 1
diabetes and that means that I had to
start thinking very carefully about my
blood glucose levels and injecting
insulin very frequently I started
wearing a body sensor which broadcast my
blood glucose values over a radio signal
to my phone and I stitched this together
with some open-source tools called X
trip and night scout and I was able to
get a real-time body feed to this art
installation which is a visualization
which represents what those numbers mean
to me numbers like 91 represent a good
and a healthy state very low values like
53 are potentially dangerous and in this
situation I can feel heartbeat sweating
shaking and so on higher numbers cause a
constriction in the flow of the
animation now higher values don’t cause
me any immediate symptoms but lots of
high numbers over time will accrue and
they cause a variety of body-wide
complications
including heart attack stroke blindness
amputation the list is long and the list
is very gruesome so the effects on me is
psychological I spend a lot of energy
and time trying to keep the numbers in a
healthy range I know that with this very
personal condition that I live with I
have to acknowledge it in order to deal
with it in order to survive
but then I realized all of us
collectively have a very similar
condition and it’s just as bad it’s just
as urgent and it’s just as
life-threatening and that’s climate
change
[Music]
I created this installation to help us
think about our global reaction to
climate change and to compare it to our
personal reactions when we’re diagnosed
with chronic illnesses ourselves there’s
something about how big and how
all-encompassing climate change is where
we say yes it’s urgent
yes it’s existential but then we allow
it to slip down in our priority list I
and people with diabetes we respond
differently we want to learn about it we
want to act on it and we want to put it
very high on the list the American
Diabetes Association publishes this
graphic on their website and it’s
designed to help newly diagnosed people
think about their options going forward
it charts the path of two fictional
characters Anna and Mary throughout
their lives and the colored dots
represent the sense of fear and of shock
and of anger and of stress whereas the
white dots represent a sense of control
you can see how these things change over
time for the two characters the key
insight is if like Mary you acknowledge
the condition early if you front-load
your engagement with the treatment
before the major symptoms start to show
then there’s good news you can live a
long and a healthy life it’s actually a
highly positive message because it shows
that you can take looming existential
threats that are actually very scary and
you can take control of them and you can
turn them into dust I want you to
imagine for a moment that you have been
diagnosed with diabetes and you’ve been
handed this child how long would you
wait to start treatment one year two
years would you begin immediately how
many hours of your day would you spend
on managing the condition how much money
would you spend where would it sit on
your priority list so here’s the thing
if you take global climate change that
situation overlays exactly onto this
chart and we as a species are already
halfway down on Anna’s trajectory there
is still time we could make a positive
leap over to Mary’s trajectory but we
need a big push from all of us to make
something like that happen and we would
need it very very quickly so you can see
what I’m doing here is I’m using
and technology to explore what the
future holds and to look at how we think
about the future I first moved to New
York in 2012 and one of the first works
I made was an audio-visual installation
called long
[Music]
[Music]
so in this work I’m using projection to
look at our perception of nature and in
this case of rocks and I’m asking can we
modify our fundamental conceptions of
these objects that we would normally
consider to be lifeless and bring a
sense of agency and movement this clip
of the process behind that shows that
I’m drawing light directly onto the
rocks and for me this is an early
example of me using art and technology
to think about our perceptions of the
world in this next project I’m exploring
depth video and this is an incredible
technology because you can shoot scenes
from one position and then you can re
render the scene from any other position
including from behind a wall this was
shot in the winding tunnels of the
London Underground and here we can see
that I’m using art and technology to
explore how we conceive of the built
urban environment of mass cities and to
think about this paradox of how being
surrounded by millions of people can
actually still be very isolating it was
while I was working on that project that
I met the artist and curator Ellen
Perlman and she was studying the same
depth technology and we started running
these workshops and events together to
support the community that built around
it Ellen then came and helped us out to
build a vibrant community around the
hardware Hat Club which is a weekly
meter run out of the New York office of
a global technology consultancy called
thought works the lab provides community
access to hardware including Virtual
Reality body sensors electronics
equipment and so on and this is become a
hub in New York for creative
collaboration following on from that we
founded our to hack and this was Ellen’s
idea of a program where we curate teams
based on an open call for applications
and then we match people together with
mixed disciplines and then we incubate
art lead explorations into various
emerging technologies again this is run
out of foot works New York and it’s done
in collaboration with a number of other
institutions like New York University
the Metropolitan Museum Media Lab
Microsoft and others
our alumni from this program have gone
on to show work at MoMA and at the
Tribeca Film Festival and and I’m not
kidding here at the North Pole Ellen has
made her own arts practice and she’s
looked in detail of brain-computer
interface which is headsets that can
read your brain state Ellen went on to
develop the world’s first brain opera at
a 360 degree theater in Hong Kong in the
Opera a performer wears a brain-computer
headset
it reads her emotional state those
emotions drive the colors and the sounds
and the videos the audience experience
nor is the name of a female British
secret agent who was dropped behind
enemy lines during World War two until
she was captured imprisoned and executed
she was very successful relaying
messages back to Britain by telling the
story through the lens of World War two
Ellen’s asking us to think about the
possibilities when this type of
technology gets into the hands of
authoritarian regimes she’s asking is
there a place in human consciousness
where surveillance cannot go so this is
another example of art and technology
questioning and critiquing a trajectory
that we’re on and you can see this with
my practice and with Ellen’s practice
and with the community programs after
hack and hardware hacker then Ellen and
I got together and we decided to take it
one step further we created a funded
arts residency based out of thought
works which supports artists who are
working with emerging technologies and
looking at the implications of those
technologies for society
you see I and many technologists that
thought works are thinking very deeply
about these types of issues and about
the future of technology and society and
where the residency we could now go much
deeper and we could have collaborations
between artists and the designers and
the developers at ThoughtWorks
the first residents we work with with a
cyborg foundation and this is Neil
Harbison and moon rebus their work is
about transhumanism and this is the
augmentation of human capabilities with
emerging technologies neil is known for
a surgical implant in his head
and if an antenna which allows him to
hear colors as sound he has a camera at
the front of the antenna and the color
frequencies from that camera are
translated into audio frequencies which
he can hear moon reboost has an implant
in her arm and this allows her to feel
whenever there’s seismic activity
anywhere in the world she’s a dancer and
a choreographer and she uses that
sensation in her performances one of the
key insights of the sidewalk foundation
is the permanent implants or permanently
worn wearables in effect become new
human senses over time the psychology of
the wearer adapts to the incoming data
stream which is always on and this
becomes another sense just like sight
and sound and smell and so on I and the
engineers from this community and the
footworks
employees collaborated with the cyborgs
on the development of two new sensors
with Neil we created a time sense which
allows him to perceive the 24-hour clock
around the circumference of his head
what he wants to do is to develop his
psychological awareness of this sense
and make it part of his internal
experience and then to adapt him to move
his sensation of time so that it goes
faster and it go slower moon has created
a new version of her seismic sense and
this one allows her to geolocate
tremors so that she can sense where they
are in the world and this is something
that’s going to give her a chance to
become much more in sync with the
movements of the planet
the futures suggested by this work are
startling with an internet-enabled sense
like moon’s seismic sense any data feed
from the internet can potentially become
your internalized bodily sensation what
are the implications of that as our
children grow up in a world where these
types of augmentations are available to
those that can afford it and providing
advantages to those that can afford it
what are going to be the social
pressures or the work pressures to
conform towards cyborg ISM again this is
an example of arts practice which
provokes thought and dialogue about an
emerging future
our next class resident was Heather
Dewey Hogg book and she’s known for
collecting discarded gum and cigarette
butts and extracting DNA from them she
takes them to a gene sequencing lab and
she 3d prints faces based on the traits
from that DNA you can see some examples
in a gallery setting up here during the
residency Heather collaborated with the
venn incarcerated whistleblower Chelsea
Manning and with the thought works
designer Shirley Conan go and she
produced this comic book which helps
bring this very important conversation
towards the general audience what’s
fascinating here is that shortly after
Heather started printing these faces an
industry emerged around it and vendors
started offering this as a service if
you give me some DNA I’ll give you a
face DNA analysis is getting cheaper all
of the time and everywhere we go we
leave a trail of DNA and so this raises
interesting questions about genetic
privacy and genetic surveillance and
also about bias the artificial
intelligence systems used to generate
these faces are trained on datasets
related to human conventions about race
gender and identity not scientific
models then this is how artificial
intelligence works it learns about how
humans do things and then it mimics that
that’s being alluded to in the second
pain here and artificial intelligence
like this is being rolled out across
society right now and it’s making
consequential decisions for people’s
lives including things like loan
applications or criminal sentencing
there’s significant evidence that these
systems are often learning and
automating human biases in algorithmic
form at scale and that’s something that
the designers and the users of these
systems don’t actually intend but it is
happening in practice and that’s why
with the arts residency we have an open
call out right now for an artist that
wants to go deeper into the biases of
artificial intelligence during the fall
of 2017 once again with Heather’s work
and with the residency generally we see
art practice and technology tools
helping to critique an emerging future
as an artist myself looking at personal
health and a climate change and as a
director of these programs I know that
looking into the future can be scary
there are all these unknowns and there
are all these risks but this is
somewhere where art can step in and it
can help us in an entirely unique way
whether its climate change or cyborg ism
or biased AI or DNA or brain
surveillance artists are helping us go
deep with these issues and to see them
in a new light and to understand these
amazing new ideas in a tangible way
right in front of us this helps us to
see and discuss the risks and the
opportunities and to put them into
context and that enables us to take
control of very difficult issues so this
is why I believe that bringing arts
practice much deeper into technology is
going to be crucial for the 21st century
thank you
[Applause]
you
[Music]
Please follow and like us: