Exhibition & Talk about text generation, art, poetry, tracing a path from early experiments in generated language to today's AI systems.
Speakers
Geoff Davis
David Link
Agenda
6:00pm - Introduction and discussion of themes of Oracle Machines exhibition
6:30pm - Artists contributions
7:00pm - Questions and Answers
Synopsis
From bones and entrails to algorithms and AI Curator Geoff Davis is not presenting a tidy history of computational text. He's asking why people keep building systems to extract meaning from things that don't contain any.
ORACLE MACHINES is an exhibition exploring the long relationship between humans, machines and the desire to obtain answers. It brings together computer text generation and art, poetry, AI and contemporary digital practices, tracing a path from early experiments in machine-generated language to today's AI systems.
The impulse is older: the reading of bones, entrails and tea leaves, a book opened at random, the question or the prompt, put to something that cannot answer, but answers anyway.
Oracles do not have to be right, only open to interpretation. The answer is vague, so interpreting it correctly becomes the questioner’s responsibility. A prophecy that fails has been misread, not mistaken. AI systems enjoy much the same protection. When they invent an answer, we blame the prompt, not the oracle, and keep asking.
ORACLE MACHINES exhibition includes work by Sasha Stiles, Ana Maria Caballero, Geoff Davis, ELIZA, Kalen Iwamoto, David Link, and Tivon Rice, alongside material documenting the history of oracles.
See CAS exhibition page for more information.
About the speakers
Geoff Davis is a committee member of Computer Arts Society. He founded Micro Arts Group in 1984 which released his computer art and story text generators. He has presented talks at CAS for many years and was an electronic arts and AI researcher at Middlesex University and University of the Arts London. He is an internationally exhibited and collected artist and PEN published author.
Dr David Link is a prominent media artist, computer theorist, and "media archaeologist". His work explores the intersection of art, science, and technology. He is celebrated for his pioneering installations involving generative computer art, software reconstruction, and early artificial intelligence.
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This event is brought to you by: Computer Arts Society
