Details
Exhibition and Artist Talk
Monday 10 April to Sunday 16 April
11.00am to 5:00pm daily
Exhibition featuring the work of Design Informatics Artist in Residence Theodore Koterwas. Come explore the porous boundaries between us and technology as you interact with an invisible AI learning to communicate with you physically.
Through his residency Theodore has been approaching AI from the perspective of the body: exploring what it means for AI when we consider intelligence as a process of the entire body rather than just the brain. Taking inspiration from the way gesturing while speaking is our body thinking, he has created an interactive installation in which an AI’s ‘gestures’ will be felt through your body and immediate environment. He is particularly interested in how we might react to this AI we can’t see but can feel: will we treat it as an invisible friend or an uncanny poltergeist?
Artist Talk
Tuesday 11 April
at 5.30pm
During a free artist talk, Theodore will present the conceptual and technical background to the work with an emphasis on critically reframing the nature of intelligence. Rather than point to embodiment as an irreconcilable difference between us and AI he will propose it as an opportunity to develop a healthier, more empathetic relationship with the exploding population of increasingly clever artificial others.
Click here to book your tickets for this event.
Biography
Theodore Koterwas is an artist working with data, physical phenomena and the human body to make things resonate. He seeks to draw critical attention to aspects of daily experience that often go unnoticed but profoundly impact on how we understand each other, technology and the environment.
He received his MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Early installations included projecting the reflection of the head of a single pin onto the heads of 45,000 others, attempting to shatter glass with amplified water drops, and filling an intimate interior space with the live sound of approaching footsteps. At the Exploratorium in San Francisco he collaborated with scientists to create digital installations exploring the science of perception. He has since produced work for the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, Aberdeen Performing Arts, artist and musician David Byrne and the Edinburgh Science Festival. His commission for the 2022 Science Festival saw an AI trained on the handwriting of astronomers scrawl near-realtime astronomical data on a large wall of carbon. His AI generated video installation The Nth Wave was shortlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize for Art and Technology. Currently he is focused on data visceralisation: experiencing data internally. Somewhere In The Universe It Rains Diamonds (Aether) utilises computer vision to detect cosmic rays so you can feel them in your bones. When Do You Give Yourself Away? captures your pulse and galvanic skin response to generate a multisensory experience unique to you. As Creative AI Artist in Residence for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and Creative Informatics he is investigating AI through the human body, haptics and gesture. For the 2023 Articulating Data Symposium he is critically examining the voice models underlying virtual assistants to repurpose them for interactions based on empathy rather than servitude.
Presented in partnership with Creative Informatics.