Meet the Artist
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Paul Wiersbinski's projects touch upon discourses such as architecture, entomology or cybernetics and referring to the history of performance and video art, as well as utilising notions of jest and improvisation. Often he constructs technical prototypes, which are tried out by the public and go through various phases of continuous development.
Resonances III Project
A portrait of the AI as a young Cyber Oracle
At Resonances III Festival, Paul presented his lecture performance A portrait of the AI as a young Cyber Oracle - a unique Artificial Intelligence algorithm that generated text and music, interpreted by an Opera Singer in a live performance at the Smart Grids Lab at JRC.
It aims to expose the creation of an Artificial Intelligence and its workings to a general public, dealing with the bias within programming, the notion of losing control in a world supervised by machines and the utopia of creating an all-knowing Big Data oracle. It wants to investigate, understand and expose our own relationship towards technology and how humans have always looked for the “ghost in the machine”. A unique algorithm was programmed as part of the project. It utilises the open source code already available, e.g. the language model of the Open AI programme. Part of the work is also to design a user interface to let the user play with different data sets the algorithm will use to generate cultural information in order to expose the bias of algorithms as a bias of cultural data sets. The prototype AI will be presented to and discussed with the audience during a lecture performance.
A collaboration between Paul Wiersbinski, Blagoj Delipetrev, Henrik Junklewitz and Diana Rembges.
Continued collaboration with JRC (2021)
After the Resonances III festival, Paul continued his collaboration with JRC AI expert and computer scientist Blagoj Delipetrev whom he worked with for A portrait of the AI as a young Cyber Oracle, through a residency at the JRC. They worked on a project proposal, looking also to contribute to the public visibility of the SciArt Project. With Covid restrictions easing, Paul carried out his residencies at the JRC Ispra site from the 11th to the 15th of October and the 25th to the 29th of October 2021. On the 27th of October, together with Blagoj, they introduced their work and ideas, which unfold at the nexus of art, science and technology, through a hybrid-style presentation to a live audience at the JRC and with a video live-stream for remote attendees.
Whilst no project was produced, theirs was an awesome example of the value and benefit of continued art-science collaborations at JRC, for all parties involved.
"Our aim is to invite JRC staff and visitors with or without any prior expert knowledge in the field to facilitate a discussion on the current state of AI and its future perspectives. We want to investigate what is currently possible with Artificial Intelligence in terms of “reviving” thinkers from the past, and provide the public with a playful insight and multi-sensory reflection on the implications, critical discourses, hopes and fears associated with the development of this technology. The aim of our approach is not purely technical but also a reflection on the possibilities of new AI-driven technologies to recreate and alter reality. We want to investigate how visualisations of utopian architectures have been a way to represent the “otherness” contained in discourses about technological development, specifically in AI or foreign alien technology. " - Blagoj Delipetrev and Paul Wiersbinski
During the presentation, Paul illustrated the various AI-related projects he has been developing since the collaboration. He will elaborate on how a public art commission by the Federal German Government, a performance by the Federal German Theater Fund, and exhibitions with various sculptures, installations and video works, all show that scientific research can facilitate the production of new artworks. Blagoj explained how artworks can inspire science and how their collaboration can foster research, in the field of AI in particular. He focused on how the political dimension of regulating this technology within the EU has become an increasingly important issue in recent times.
The presentation concluded with an insight into the development of their collaboration in 2021. They worked on a project proposal to advance and enhance their former project's GPT-2 generated text and music, using AI video impersonations to address current refacing technology, and digital immortality.
Read more here.