Simulated Worlds: Participatory World-Building with Artificial Intelligence
Vanessa Rosa Artist Talk + Interactive AI Experience
December 2, 2012
7:00pm - 10:00pm
All ages
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Seated program
Gray Area is pleased to present Simulated Worlds: Participatory World-Building with Artificial Intelligence, a special program created in collaboration with Xenoform Labs. In this special session, Xenoforms artist-in-residence Vanessa Rosa will explore the capacity of new AI image-making technologies like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney (among others) to empower communities of artists to create together.
The artist will share her own artistic process, discuss the history and current state of generative AI art, and invite the public to create AI powered animations by contributing their own prompts and working directly with the software. Participants will be immersed in computer-generated imagery, as they craft clever prompts that test the boundaries of human-machine imagination.
As we explore the art of the possible with generative AI, we can begin by asking the question: How do we enable free expression with generative AI while respecting human artists through proper attribution and value flows?
Nevermined Arcadia enables collaborative on-chain storytelling through the creation and organization of AI interpolated videos into continuous stories. Each prompt triggers a transaction that registers the assets on-chain and publishes them to decentralized, open storage, all with proper attribution and provenance recorded.
Nevermined.io is a data interactivity protocol that enables your content assets to become interactive and collaborative. Nevermined supports open creative ecosystems through creating tools and paradigms that empower creators and communities.
Originated from clay and shaped into ceramics, Little Martians live their lives telling sci-fi tales about humans who mutate to adapt to a changing environment. Humans who don’t see a difference anymore between the physical world and its virtual simulation. Humans that become Martians, a colorful, genderless, only head and no body, version of ourselves. They are a playful extrapolation of some of the futuristic stereotypes of our present society.
Their existence is a co-creation between the artist and the AIs themselves. The artist makes the ceramic heads and someone writes a raw idea, a first paragraph to their story. They expand on it, and make endless new versions. The artist chooses the ones she likes. Another AI model makes voices for them, another does the facial animation, another helps with the 3d scanning. Creativity merges into one flow and technology adapts.
However normal our thoroughly digitized lives may seem to us, and however complete the transition from analog to metaverse may be, the Oracle illustrates how each and every one of us, in essence, is preoccupied with the same questions:Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we supposed to do with our time?
Answers to these questions that drive our curiosity and occupy us deep down inside have been unavailable to human kind for millennia and will probably remain so. Regardless, to questions such as these, which are not easily answered, the oracle responds.
The "Oracle" is an interactive generative art installation collaboratively created by Rivka Dette, interdisciplinary artist from Berlin, and Gene Kogan, programmer and generative artist, based in San Francisco.The Oracle program works with the neural network language processing model known as GPT-3. Visitors of the installation can ask any question, which will be randomly answered by the oracle's artificial intelligence.
Vanessa Rosa teaches a free workshop on AI image-making and prompt-writing.
Two different dates are offered for this workshop, Tuesday, November 29, and Thursday, December 1, from 5pm - 7pm:
Vanessa Rosa is a US-based, Brazilian visual artist. Her work merges physical and digital media into a storytelling continuum—murals become portals to an imaginary world with projection mapping, and ceramics metamorphose into living entities with the aid of AI models. These hybrid tools allow Rosa to tell fictional tales about world history, past and possible futures intertwined. Rosa has exhibited her work around the world. Some of her most notable projects include: the 'Little Martians' sci fi universe, the Art History children’s book 'Diana’s World', a painting about domestic violence for UN Women, a large scale mural for Pioneer Works (NYC, USA), a mural for Le Centre (Cotonou, Benin), and coordination of the Sankofa project during Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games.
Gene Kogan is an artist and a programmer who is interested in autonomous systems, collective intelligence, generative art, and computer science. He initiated ml4a, a free book about machine learning for creative practice, and regularly gives workshops and lectures on topics at the intersection of AI and art. Gene is currently building Eden, a toolkit for generative AI, and Abraham, an autonomous artificial artist.
Christopher Lejeune is a California native entrepreneur, designer, & environmental activist. He is the co-founder of Obscura Digital - and Projecting Change -
Scott Kildall has been working with art + technology + education for over 15 years and is an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute. His work looks at the interplay between territory and technology and aims to repurpose technology for liberation rather than replication and augmentation of power structures, as often happens without artistic intervention. He is an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute and runs his own artist-in-residency program, Xenoform Labs in San Francisco to support new media artists from outside of the Bay Area.
The mission of Xenoform Labs is to support new media artists – those who work at the intersection between art and technology with criticality – throughout the beginning stages of shaping and experimenting their practice; and giving these artists the space for interaction and conversation with local artists, thinkers, curators, writers and creatives. In such a tech-centric city, Xenoform strives to provide a space where artists working with new technologies have the ability to help shape the narrative by including community into their artistic processes.
Established in October 2018, Xenoform Labs features ample studio space and housing for a solo artist or couple, within a home environment, in San Francisco’s historic Mission District. The studio includes digital media, virtual-reality hardware, media production and light-fabrication capabilities. Xenoform asks artists to come prepared with an initial inquiry, to be able to focus solely on the process of experimentation, so that their ideas can take shape and become the foundation of refined and finished works.
Xenoform Labs project also hosts an curated outdoor sculptural space in the town of Bombay Beach at two beach parcels, near other outdoor art. The goal of this space is to provide a physical desert environment that can include a conversation about Land Art as it applies to new media technologies.
