"Everyday Voices and Voids: Reclaiming and Transcoding our Data as Performance", the artistic research project currently developed by Afroditi Psarra (DXARTS), Audrey Desjardins (Design) and Bonnie Whiting (Music) was selected to be presented in the context of the Adversarial Hacking in the Age of AI workshop, organized by the KIM research group at HfG Karlsruhe and Transmediale 2020 festival.
By “adversarial hacking in the age of AI” the workshop refers to facing and challenging a new and complex construct: the statistical models at the core of machine learning. And it specifically asks: What is the statistical model of a neural network or a support-vector machine? How can its biases and vulnerabilities be located? What does it mean, ultimately, to hack a statistical model? Hacking is understood as a question of knowledge production and as a methodology to break into the technological abstractions of AI. Participants are invited to study how AI systems fail but also how they learn from errors. The aim is to explore how a black-boxed system becomes less opaque, and therefore more vulnerable, but also how it ultimately absorbs and integrates faults, errors, and hacks for its optimization.
About KIM research group at HfG Karlsruhe
The research group KIM, Künstliche Intelligenz und Medienphilosophie (in English, Artificial Intelligence and Media Philosophy) was initiated by Prof. Matteo Pasquinelli at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in 2018. In 2019, it received a start-up grant from the Volkswagen Stiftung for a project to examine how learning machines “see” the world and how humans see the world anew through these machines. The research network involves KIT Karlsruhe, Potsdam University, Leuphana University Lüneburg, and transmediale as event partner.
Website: kim.hfg-karlsruhe.de
About Transmediale
transmediale creates a space for critical reflection on cultural transformation from a post-digital perspective. For over thirty years, the annual festival for art and digital culture has been bringing together international artists, researchers, activists, and thinkers with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era through the entanglement of different genres and curatorial approaches. In the course of its history, transmediale has grown from its beginnings as VideoFilmFest to one of the most important events for art and digital culture worldwide. Beyond the yearly event, transmediale is a transversal, dynamic platform with a vibrant community and a strong network that facilitates regular publications and year-round activities including commissions and artist residencies. Website: https://transmediale.de
More info on the workshop can be found here: https://2020.transmediale.de/
You can read more about the project here...