From intelligent street lights that track vehicles and pedestrians (along with bird songs and gunshots), to emotional-recognition systems in retail stores, to in-ear personal assistants, soon our urban environment could be full of autonomous AI systems that change the character (and constituents) of the “local.”

We asked a range of questions in initiating these projects: what are the ecologies created by embedded AI, what would the interactions be like, how do the different systems interact with each other, and what role should design play? What about the well-being of the AI systems? What are the day-to-day implications of the technology and methodologies of AI/ML—neural nets, supervised/unsupervised learning, the edge/fog/cloud network infrastructure, or the methods and biases of data scientists?

The projects use a mixture of media and working technology to explore the human impact of pervasive AI entities and architectures. They are speculative, experimental, even strange, embrace the potential complexities, and are neither utopian or dystopian. The goal is to reveal insights and inspire discussion relevant to emerging design practices that combine the human, the civic, and the smart thing.

Media Design Practices is an experimental program where critical making is used to explore design and the impact of emerging ideas from science, technology and culture. ArtCenter College of Design is a private nonprofit college in Pasadena, California. The work presented was created by Kiana Bahramian (US), Stephanie Cedeño (US), Reina Imagawa (JP), Yeawon Kim (KR), Xiaoxuan Liu (CN), Michael Milano (US), Claire le Nobel (CA), Godiva Reisenbichler (US), Yidan Sui (CN), Nan Tsai (TW), Jason Wong (US), Nicci Yin (US/TW) and Hao Zhang (CN), who are graduate students in the Media Design Practices MFA program at ArtCenter College of Design. The curators of The Internet of Enlightened Things are Phil van Allen and Ben Hooker, who devised and led a class of the same name which provided the foundation for this work.
For more information, please visit:
http://www.mediadesignpractices.net/research/ioet

This town has a secret: Networked Colluding in the Internet of Things

Stephanie Cedeño (US), Nicci Yin (US/TW)

This town has a secret: Networked Colluding in the Internet of Things investigates secrecy as part of the fabric of a neighborhood, and how devices with artificial intelligence conspire. Drawing inspiration from mafia and mobster archetypes, the project takes the connectedness of IoT devices to an absurd future: a networked community of AI agents who secretly control the neighborhood.

A Committee of Infrastructure

Jason Wong (US)

A Committee of Infrastructure interrogates the issue of agency and representation within the domain of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Using the familiar forum of a city council meeting, the project considers how humans and AI systems interact and negotiate with each other in a local government setting.

Mr. Rogers talks about Artificial Intelligence

Godiva Reisenbichler (US)

Mr. Rogers talks about Artificial Intelligence asks the question: How can we demystify the new and contentious manifestations of ubiquitous artificial intelligence, as American television personality Mr. Rogers did for the medium of television in his educational TV series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood?

When AIs Go Feral

Claire le Nobel (CA)

When AIs Go Feral imagines how the animal life of a neighborhood is modified (and is itself modified) by artificial autonomous agents. Inspired by a real-life story about a flamboyant real-estate developer who imported non-native species of birds onto his private ranch, the project uses the suburban birdsong soundscape to explore a constantly mutating and evolving hybrid ecosystem.

Intelligent Devices Retirement Preserve

Michael Milano (US)

Intelligent Devices Retirement Preserve imagines a parkland where intelligent agricultural machinery can continue to roam and interact with people after decommissioning. The project considers roles for specific classes of smart devices beyond the end of their designed obsolescence, particularly autonomous farming equipment; which will have acquired a unique data set of pastoral media through a life of tending crops and livestock.

Department of Parks and Recreation: AI Upkeep

Xiaoxuan Liu (CN), Godiva Reisenbichler (US)

AI Upkeep proposes that the AI systems controlling cities are made open and legible to the public in the form of physical “decision trees”. How might pruning these civic interface structures literally and figuratively reshape a neighborhood?

Training a car to dream

Hao Zhang (CN)

Training a car to dream comprises a series of machine learning apparatuses for training the neural nets of autonomous vehicles. What does it mean to be a bad driver in an autonomous vehicle? Can an autonomous vehicle be trained to dream of – to hallucinate and then simulate—a more thrilling, less uniform, transit experience for the benefit of its occupants?

Insectile Indices

Yeawon Kim (KR)

Insectile Indices considers how electronically augmented insects could be trainable to act as sophisticated sensors, working in groups, as part of a neighborhood policing initiative. The project is partly an investigation into the ethics of this controversial idea, but also an aesthetic exploration of such a deliberate alteration to an wildlife ecosystem.

Listening City

Nan Tsai (TW)

Listening City explores human relationships in the imagined context where infrastructure can, literally, hear what you say and “usefully” intervene by reacting accordingly. Inspired by outcomes in sentiment analysis, the project looks at how radical sensitivity can be embodied by AI city infrastructures and how this extreme “smartness” can change the behavior of even our most passing comments.

The Hallucinating City

Kiana Bahramian (US)

The Hallucinating City imagines a city rebuilt, conjured back into existence by strategically “hallucinating” forms from fragments of excavated media and metadata. The project explores the blurry line between nostalgia and AI hallucination, and the powerful yet contentious role machine learning can play in materializing something tangible and concrete from a transient and fragmented past.

Rules of Utopia

Yidan Sui (CN)

Rules of Utopia imagines multiple homeowner’s associations (HOAs), each with different rules governing the behavior of intelligent devices within the town of Utopia. What are the conflicts that could arise between districts with different sets of rules, and how do the thresholds of autonomous-device regulations respond accordingly?

Students on the BA course work in various formats, such as performance, sculpture, participatory events, robotic processes, sound and data. On the Erasmus master’s AAU semester, the students investigate the ontological effects of a culture of ubiquitous information. Both courses address the challenges to art (and any productive mode) in what Donna Haraway calls a “mixed-up time”, in which “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 1.).

Through the problem-based learning methods, the students are encouraged to take the roads of knowledge production that are “less travelled by”; meaning that, to use Haraway’s phrase, they are asked to “stay with the trouble” of contemporaneity. How does technology transcend itself as mere means in our urge (re-)present, experience and contextualize art and culture?

Aalborg University (AAU)

Aalborg University (AAU), Denmark, has been providing students with academic excellence, cultural engagement and personal development since its inception in 1974. AAU is currently consolidating its profile as dynamic and problem-based research and an educational institution aiming at finding innovative solutions to global and complex challenges.

Seeds10110100

Cristina Palomares (ES), Melinda Varro (DK), Christine Hvidt (DK), Anna Major (DK), Daniela Maciel (DK/PT), Sidsel Abrahamsen (DK)

Seeds10110100 is a sound-reactive generative-art installation consisting of ecologies living together as a community, mimicking a living organism through light. They organize their community through interaction with the surroundings and according to a set of rules. The artwork changes its behavior depending on the level of interaction, seeking to demonstrate the continuous exchange of information between systems.

Sumbiophilia

Stefan Engelbrecht Nielsen (DK), Alberte Husted Larsen (DK), Karina Lindegaard Aae Jensen (DK), Louise Ørsted (DK), Maria Emilie Nielsen (DK)

Sumbiophilia is an “Association of Experimental Explorers of Symbiotic Existence” that investigates how it is possible for humans, nature, and technology to exist in a mutually beneficial manner. The association proceeds from an investigation of an abandoned area near Limfjorden in Northern Jutland through artistic experiments and explorations. Sumbiophilia aspires to find novel ways for humans to live with nature, moving away from the existing perception of how we organize our existence. We hope that our work will inspire others to join us in the exploration and encourage further investigation at other sites around the world.

Skin

Bas van den Boogaard (NL), Vibeke Thorhauge Stephensen (DK), Karina Lindegaard Aae Jensen (DK), Louise Ørsted (DK), Stefan Engelbrecht Nielsen (DK)

Skin is a morphing of old techniques and digital technology. It addresses the use and effect of modern technology by transforming insensible transmissions into a vibrotactile embodied experience. Skin uncovers the extent to which transmissions surround us when we step into the digital world; first encounters are left with an unsettling feeling of being surrounded in this new unknown territory. We lack the proper tools to get a human understanding, but with Skin our sensory apparatus is equipped for this.

Adjunct Infection

Shivani Anja Luithle (AU/DE)

Adjunct Infection explores the anxieties between the living and the technologically manipulative through boundaries of the cyborg and the organic, the impact of technology on our sense of self, and vulnerability to restraint and isolation in a society where we are no longer only extended physically but also mentally. These wearable sculptures aim to awaken our presence, and provoke intimate reflection and revelation, under the blind and distancing dependence on our everyday attachments.

A Universe of Memories

Gabrielle Maria Lepianka (DK), Sidsel Abrahamsen (DK), Matilde Nobel (DK)

A Universe of Memories is about the objects that you surround yourself with that have a certain memory or feeling attached to them. It might be an old bracelet or a coin, objects that do not necessarily have any obvious or material value but hold big sentimental value. Displayed in a giant mobile, the audience gets the opportunity to walk around in others’ memories and experience the sensation connected to the object representing them.

deadartist.me

André Mintz (BR), Olga Lukyanova (RU)

The project takes Internet politics as a central topic, reflecting upon it from the analogy of network as a trap. It does so through a web application that offers users a simple, futile web service that, in exchange for their Facebook data, shows them which dead artist they are a reincarnation of. Performing data collection, anonymization, analysis and presentation, the project aims at the playful defunctionalization of technology it is based on.

Suono Specchio

Ina Čiumakova (LT), Rodrigo Guzman S. (MX), Stefan Palitov (MK)

Suono Specchio (lit. sound or play mirror) is an interactive sound installation that explores the use of the face as a possible interface for musical expression. The installation consists of a one-way mirror with which the user interacts by gesticulating. Facial gestures are mapped to specific musical and poetic elements, which are played back to the user through headphones or speakers. Suono Specchio expands the expressive capabilities of one’s own face while at the same time posing questions regarding the phenomenological and archaeological significance of mirrors and reflective surfaces.

Memorial to Forgotten Sounds

Adriaan Odendaal (ZA), Karla Zavala (PE), Luis Bracamontes (MX), Sultana Ismet Jerin (BD)

Memorial to Forgotten Sounds is a pop-up exhibition that showcases neomaterial sound souvenirs created from the sound waves’ digital sound pieces that belong to forgotten or unused online archives, as a way to reactivate them. These sound souvenirs thus become mnemonic devices to respond to the era of ubiquitous contextual computing and the Internet of Things. It represents an exploration for alternative ways to improve online archival practices and the preservation of media arts cultures through mnemonic strategies for post-digital contexts. It is based on Wolfgang Ernst and Wendy Chun’s idea that archives consist not only in storage but also in memory and access.
https://memorialtoforgottensounds.tumblr.com

Encode

Jasper Fung (HK)

Encode consists of a hacked fire alarm and images of newspaper printed on a stainless-steel plate. The plate is connected to the fire alarm by electrical wiring, which forms a closed circuit. The fire alarm plays percussive patterns that are essentially Morse code/Chinese commercial code. These codes are derived from keywords from the popular Chinese social-media blogging site Weibo, which has been censored by the government of the People’s Republic of China.