Workshop and Call for Submissions
AI Yesterday, a digital zine and transmedia forum, is hosting a workshop on AI’s materiality at ACM Creativity & Cognition June 20 in Venice. We are looking for participants to join us in a day of making, research and reflection with the physical materials that underpin AI systems.
The AI Yesterday project is supported by TORCH through the Minderoo-Oxford Challenge Fund in AI Governance.
Making AI
MAKING AI: ADVANCING CREATIVE APPROACHES TO THE DESIGN OF AI SYSTEMS THROUGH THE CRAFT OF MAKING THEM
https://aiyesterday.com/ACM-C-C-Workshop
The objective of this workshop is to rethink ‘making’ AI through a focus on the physical materials involved in designing, producing, and running artificially intelligent systems. The recent manufacturing chip shortage illuminates digital technologies’ physicality and the fragility of the commodity and production networks that underpin the AI systems our cities, governments, and workplaces have come to rely on. Those that are conventionally considered to ‘make’ AI through the design of AI systems are largely divorced from AI’s materiality and the craft of making AI. Corresponding research on AI and creativity focuses primarily on the digital artefacts, potentials and imaginaries AI creates, and less so on the social and material artefacts embedded in its ability to create. We hope to push participants beyond the theoretical knowing of AI materiality to tactile knowing through a practice-based approach to ‘making’ AI. Reorienting the focus of AI to materials and the supply chain as sites of creative intervention could leverage the potential of sensory, tactile experiences to spur re-imaginations of AI technologies and infrastructures. Ultimately, the aim is to advance creative approaches to the design of AI systems through the craft of making them.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
We encourage submissions from academics, artists and industry practitioners.
Through the workshop we aim to build a meaningful integration amongst people who might not otherwise actively collaborate, seeing how collectively they may characterize, visualize, and describe AI. As we encourage participation outside the academy, we hope to draw on both the workshop’s location in Venice, with a long history of global trade and craft, and the 2022 Biennale as sites of situated community collaboration.
The findings from this workshop will support Issue 03: AI Materials, and relevant methodological insights as research methods for future journal publications.
Submission deadline: May 12
Submissions@aiyesterday.com
Notification of acceptance: May 15
SUBMISSION FORMAT
Participants will be asked to submit a one page reflection (A4 sized) on their understanding of the materials and labour used in AI, situating reflections within existing AI and creativity research. Participants can use text, art, collage, photoshop: any materials they feel comfortable using. The reflections will become participants first contributions to a binder that we develop during the workshop.
