Creative AI meetup #22: Quantum Britishness and Computational Spectatorship

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Daniel Chávez Heras, PhD Student, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London

"Seen by machine: computational spectatorship and the BBC archive"

Creative machine learning promises to (re)produce visual culture automatically, and offers to its audiences confounding pictures of authorship, authenticity and value. But beyond the hype and the many misleading headlines about “creative machines”, there are powerful social and economic forces that have driven artists and creators of all kinds towards machine learning. By looking at the recent television programme Made by Machine: When AI met the Archive —a project in which I collaborated with a small team of technologists at BBC R&D to generate sequences out of archive footage using machine learning— we will discuss the idea of the television archive as “cultural big data”, and its automatic browsing as an instance of computational spectatorship: a way to understand how our visual regimes are increasingly mediated by machine seers.

Daniel has been working with pictures and computers, in various capacities, for over ten years. He trained as a designer, back in his native Mexico, and has worked professionally in print media, television, and digital. In 2010 he was awarded a Jumex fellowship for the study of contemporary art, and he holds an MA in Film Studies from King’s College London, where he is now trying to train computers to watch films for his PhD at the department of digital humanities. Daniel has published in international peer-reviewed journals on film & computing, videogames & art history, and has taught university courses, in Mexico and the UK, on visual narrative, digital aesthetics, and most recently on the politics of online networks and social media.

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Libby Heaney, Artist, PhD Quantum Computing, Tutor (research) at the Royal College of Art

"A Quantum Britishness: Intra-active algorithms"

With the rise of nationalism it is important to reassess collective and individual (national) identities and search for new ways of questioning notions of authenticity and origin. In my mind, Karen Barad’s theory of intra-action is useful for this end. Intra-action posits that objects or phenomena do not precede their interaction but instead emerge within a system. Through this lens we will reassess the phenomena of ‘Britishness’, particularly by bringing machine learning algorithms into play. In relation to this, I will discuss my recent Sky Arts Art 50 commission, Britbot and we will think more widely about how dominant narratives (such as those around British culture and history) may be diffracted into strange new forms. www.britbot.org is a net-based chatbot which uses both rule based and generative models to explore the concept of Britishness at this critical moment in history. Trained initially on the UK government’s citizenship test and corresponding textbook Life in the United Kingdom 2017, as people talk to Britbot it gradually learns from what they say.

www.britbot.org

Libby Heaney is an artist, researcher and lecturer with a background in quantum physics. Her artistic research is particularly concerned with the impacts of new technologies. In order to explore science and technology from multiple viewpoints, Libby retrained as an artist at Central St. Martins and tutored on the Information Experience Design program at the Royal College of Art since 2014 as a visiting lecturer and since 2016 as a permanent faculty member. She has exhibited in London (including Tate Modern, V&A and Christie's), New York, Peru, Ireland, Malta, Spain, Austria and Finland.

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The schedule for the evening will be as follows.

6.30pm - 7pm Arrive
7pm - 7.10pm Introduction
7.10pm-7.50pm First talk - Daniel Chávez Heras
7.50pm-8.30pm Second talk - Dr Libby Heaney

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