Edinburgh Futures Institute is to host an artist working with artificial intelligence as part of a new project linking emerging technologies with the city’s festivals.
International artists are invited to come to Edinburgh use their work to scrutinize the cultural, ethical, psychological and philosophical aspects of AI.
The residency will be split between Edinburgh Futures Institute, the Bayes Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz, Austria.
The artist-in-residence programme is part of the European ARTficial Intelligence Lab, which is led and organised by Ars Electronica in collaboration with 13 partners across Europe, including Edinburgh.
It is also one of the first projects of Experiential AI, a new research group and theme at Edinburgh Futures Institute, which will look at how art and public participation can make the operation of a machine learning system tangible, legible, and accessible to the people whose data are captured and acted upon.
Experiential AI at Edinburgh Futures Institute will connect AI research to Edinburgh’s Festivals, and thereby to the civic and cultural life of the Edinburgh city region.
It is led by Dr Drew Hemment, who has been recently appointed as a Chancellor’s Fellow to help establish the Edinburgh Futures Institute and develop research spanning data, futures and festivals.
The artist residency is part of a suite of public activity from the Edinburgh Futures Institute on the theme of Data-Driven Innovation.
Dr Hemment said: “Artificial intelligence is reordering how we live, work and play in ways that are both unexpected and profound. Art can play an essential role in helping to question and understand the consequences of these technologies for our everyday lives.”
The Edinburgh residency open call of the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab will be launched in the summer. Artists who use machine learning algorithms or data as their material will be invited to apply from August 2019.
The European ARTificial Intelligence Lab is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
