On occasion of STANZA’s visit to the JRC site in Ispra on November 9, the London-based artist, currently under residency at MEET Digital Culture Centre Milan, introduced his artistic interests to our researchers who are working on topics related to his project.
In the talk, STANZA, who will develop an artwork to be exhibited in 2024 within the framework of a larger exhibition S+T+ARTS in the City, reflected on the concept of the city in the time of the Koinocene: a new era of interconnectedness among human beings, other living organisms, and even non-living beings, including AI as a detector of collective memories and desires with the potential to imagine novel forms of well-being for the city.
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Aestheticizing experiences by visualizing lens-based technologies of surveillance cultures, STANZA seeks to place his audience into relationship with the question of “who owns data?”. In the Q&A and discussion, he presented artistic frames that display a complicit entanglement in given data situations. His alluding introduction to a sense of data consciousness importantly touched upon the question whether the city of the future will essentially be governed by algorithms.
Responding to the momentous explosion of AI’s capabilities and dangers, in the artist’s own words, his goal is “to propose functional questions as we speculate on a narrow set of parameters at the moment.” Consequently, he locates his artworks as operating between dystopia and utopia, putting the audience in middle of the question mark and placing the emergence of AI in the lens of the beholder.
Artist statement:
“I aim to build autonomous artworks whose data input forms a separate ‘consciousness’; a self-learning co-creation system that monitors the real-time invisible city as an interface in the form of a series of poetic data visualisation artworks. These generative AI artworks will act out a positive agency from myriads of data and send instructions. My ambition as an independent artist is to find technology support/collaborators that might facilitate this open-ended inquiry and then create metaphors (artworks) that contribute to the conversation about the ethics of the machine as a system of control and suggestion the city of the future will be mediated by data.”
--STANZA
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