DIGITAL WILD [Conference]

Zane Cerpina

Digital Wild Conference bends and twists our ideas and illusions about the digital. What happens outside of the ordinary, problem-oriented scheme of thinking? Where do things get wild, untamed and kinky? How to twist the purposes of technologies? Or better; get rid of the obvious and question the rational?

Digital Wild Conference gathers a wide selection of experts to take us on a tour between our wildest digital dreams and darkest technological nightmares…

The Art in Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence” is not one grand thing, it is a grab-bag of many different technologies.  Some of them are ready for use in the artist atelier, while others are close. But which ones can work, and why, and what artistic purpose might they serve?  In this presentation, Bruce Sterling runs through four different futurist scenarios for possible artistic applications of deep learning, machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, neural nets, and even some good old-fashioned, rules-based, antiquated Artificial Intelligence…

Thinking with My Disembodied Brain

The digital environment gets severely difficult to survive since the incredibly powerful algorithms are taking over. Our databodies that are formed of millions of bits are more and more endangered since our care for them isn’t part of our culture yet. The pandemonic AI delirium where everything in our connected life is going to be processed, is offering an odd picture of the world where nobody and nothing will be excluded…

Glamorous Failures and Smart Failings

Imaginary projects, one-off inventions, provocative design fictions: the kitten in the ditch, the Cinderella story in reverse. I have always loved technology, but I never adored or worshipped it, and have always been aware of endless abuse potentials. Since a house needs walls, an internet house needs firewalls…

Red in Bluetooth and Claw: Bions vrs. Bytes

Can the relations between Bions and Bytes have lasting power, seductive mutualisms, relational integrity even without dignity? Is it data down to the bodily form, the growth of axes, the specialization of the orifices, the orificial economy, the complexity of metabolic syndromes? Is it possible that data is more poetic and less rational, more infectious in a wet charismatic cultishness than dry, cyborgian reductionism of our wilding natures?…

Our New World Order – How AI is Changing Everything

A new world order has emerged and continues to evolve at incredible speed. Many view AI as one of the, if not the most, disruptive and far-reaching technology in the history of mankind. The ‘age’ of artificial intelligence (AI) is an era defined by a technological revolution that infiltrates every walk of life; information control, governance, surveillance, privacy, society and what it fundamentally means to be human. Without regulation, legislation and frameworks for governance based on crucial ethical standards, we run the risk of losing our grip on this fast-evolving technology, our democracy and lives…

Twas Brillig, and the Skeuomorphs, Did Gyre and Gimble in the Wilds

In this talk, Daniel will use the concept of the skeuomorph to explore the digital outer limits, where strange human/machine hybrid monsters toil and mutate in their desire to be recognised. hat can domesticated parrots teach us about our relationship with AI voice assistants? What do tumbleweeds, bumbling across the dust bowl, have in common with the geo-engineers who consider the Planet Earth a design object?…

Digitally Enhanced Foot-orthotics to Revolutionise Artistic Swimming

Feet adorned or costumed as the object of visual and performance art have the power to explore and express socio-political and feminist concepts. Alex’s ongoing artistic research into the liberation of the feet in theatrical contexts using computational footwear takes on a new dimension with her explorations into kelp based bioplastics for addictive manufacturing processes to produce underwater computational foot-orthotics. Her objective is to transform synchronised swimming into something messy, provocative, non-binary and pop, through the affordances of digitally enhanced foot-appendages on artistic swimmers…

SHANZHAI ARCHEOLOGY – Rewilding Technological Imaginaries

Shanzhai (山寨) is a derogatory term used in China to qualify objects that are cheaply made, poorly counterfeit or just plain crappy. In a way, “shanzhai” evokes to a Chinese person a similar concept as “Made in China” would for a Western one. Investigating these unconventional technological artefacts outside China can help us challenge the dominant, one-sided stories about innovation and eventually help us reconsider the normative, western imaginaries of technology…

Shape

We present the prototype of a new musical instrument, where the instrument learns to know the performer rather than the other way around. The method is interface-agnostic and can be adapted to various input devices (camera, sensors, keyboards, etc.)…

Living Architecture: Cultivating the Digital Wild

Our understanding of physics, chemistry and biology at the subatomic level is bringing disparate worlds together in new ways. From a quantum perspective, convergent technologies increasingly uphold the operations of life, where electron flow unites life with the “digital” realm. This is not just a matter of degree – whereby we are “becoming” machine – but a question of kind, where new expressions of the living world are possible. Such expressions challenge the implicit fatalism of ecocide – this is why they are important…

Multiple Flygskams

Richard still doesn’t completely understand the meaning of the notion of the Digital Wild, but hopes to find out during his talk by describing a number of his works, before asking the audience if they think that such examples fit the theme of the conference or not…

Food Phreaks: Exploits, Experiments and Explorations in the Human Food System

Our artistic research has been shaped by our desire to meaningfully engage very diverse groups in the process of imagining a more just, biodiverse and beautiful food system—scientists, hackers, farmers, chefs, food activists and general public on the street. In order to disrupt the rationalist rhetorical strategies deployed by corporations, think tanks, science labs and NGOs we drew on arational rhetorical strategies of joy, generosity, delight, antagonism, bewilderment, awe and disgust, taking inspiration from phone phreaking and biohacking…