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Project: GROUND
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Funding: Canada Council for the Arts
Collaborators: Jocelyn Ibarra, Jerrold McGrath (UKAI), Noelle Perfue, Mida Fiore, Willem Deisinger (UKAI), Kasra Goodarzenhad (UKAI), Luisa Ji (UKAI), Mihoko Maeno
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Project: GROUND
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Funding: Canada Council for the Arts
Collaborators: Jocelyn Ibarra, Jerrold McGrath (UKAI), Noelle Perfue, Mida Fiore, Willem Deisinger (UKAI), Kasra Goodarzenhad (UKAI), Luisa Ji (UKAI), Mihoko Maeno
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GROUND is a tabletop role-playing game about a strange entity that wants to be remembered, or perhaps left alone.
GROUND is played with other people and each of you will play a ‘role’ based on an idea that has been remembered: beauty, rage, body, faith, knowledge, green, or disorder.
GROUND grows the more you play it. At first it’s just you and your group. Then there is the Oracle, made of language and wires. Then the goat. The less said about the goat, the better. Then there is the cave, and the world, and the rituals we bring to make a home in it.
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GROUND is a tabletop role-playing game about a strange entity that wants to be remembered, or perhaps left alone.
GROUND is played with other people and each of you will play a ‘role’ based on an idea that has been remembered: beauty, rage, body, faith, knowledge, green, or disorder.
GROUND grows the more you play it. At first it’s just you and your group. Then there is the Oracle, made of language and wires. Then the goat. The less said about the goat, the better. Then there is the cave, and the world, and the rituals we bring to make a home in it.
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Project: AI Ritual
Location: Toronto (ON), Berlin, Wakefield (QB)
Collaborators: Nadia Ross, Dan Tapper, Jerrold McGrath (UKAI), Willem Deisinger (UKAI), Kasra Goodarzenhad (UKAI), Luisa Ji (UKAI)
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Project: AI Ritual
Location: Toronto (ON), Berlin, Wakefield (QB)
Collaborators: Nadia Ross, Dan Tapper, Jerrold McGrath (UKAI), Willem Deisinger (UKAI), Kasra Goodarzenhad (UKAI), Luisa Ji (UKAI)
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AI Ritual is an immersive performance work driven by a large language model (LLM) that was trained by UKAI. A co-production with STO Union, the work was initially presented at the Spy on Me festival at Hebbel am ufer (HAU1) in Berlin in September 2022 and at Out Loud! in Wakefield, PQ in November 2022.
This project allows the audience to share their hopes and fears with a computer that listens. The audience’s varied responses provide a basis for the AI to articulate its own hopes and fears before being erased so that the cycle of being born, learning, speaking, and dying can begin again. Audiences become part of a performance that constitutes and makes visible how human choices are tangled up in the technological systems that organize our social and economic lives.
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AI Ritual is an immersive performance work driven by a large language model (LLM) that was trained by UKAI. A co-production with STO Union, the work was initially presented at the Spy on Me festival at Hebbel am ufer (HAU1) in Berlin in September 2022 and at Out Loud! in Wakefield, PQ in November 2022.
This project allows the audience to share their hopes and fears with a computer that listens. The audience’s varied responses provide a basis for the AI to articulate its own hopes and fears before being erased so that the cycle of being born, learning, speaking, and dying can begin again. Audiences become part of a performance that constitutes and makes visible how human choices are tangled up in the technological systems that organize our social and economic lives.
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Project: Restructuring Futures
Location: Online
Funding: Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund
Partnerships: The Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence, Hypha Worker Cooperative, msdm.
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Project: Restructuring Futures
Location: Online
Funding: Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund
Partnerships: The Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence, Hypha Worker Cooperative, msdm.
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Restructuring Futures is a 2-year project to develop a shared collaborative workspace for asynchronous creation for cultural product and projects. The tools will be designed for the “culture that’s coming”, specifically to be resilient to political and ecological disturbances, rising authoritarianism and failures of centralized systems.
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Restructuring Futures is a 2-year project to develop a shared collaborative workspace for asynchronous creation for cultural product and projects. The tools will be designed for the “culture that’s coming”, specifically to be resilient to political and ecological disturbances, rising authoritarianism and failures of centralized systems.
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Project: I'm Honoured to Serve
Location: Ottawa, Ontario
2022, 15min video, 24” x 36” ink jet posters.
Artists: Willem Deisinger and Sarah Hodgson
Collaborators: Dr. Jason Millar and Professor Chantal Rodier.
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Project: I'm Honoured to Serve
Location: Ottawa, Ontario
2022, 15min video, 24” x 36” ink jet posters.
Artists: Willem Deisinger and Sarah Hodgson
Collaborators: Dr. Jason Millar and Professor Chantal Rodier.
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Details: I’m Honoured To Serve explores the insidious guise of digital environments made to generate user data in a way to profit from the unsuspecting user. Through this mult-media installation, we attempt to make visible the implicit conventions that are imposed on users while being manipulated into giving unpaid laborer. With the permeation of AI, we have become complacent in volunteering our labour through the commercialization, popularization and glamorization of consumer tech that creates the illusion of capability and power. While this modern technology holds up the facade of an adept, powerful, and neutral tool meant to serve the user, the technology we interact with is always embedded with values, character traits, and fictional backgrounds to create a marketable product with a personality. It functions less as a neutral tool with advanced capabilities and more as a product embedded with opaque motives operating behind a facade not clearly understood by the user.
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Details: I’m Honoured To Serve explores the insidious guise of digital environments made to generate user data in a way to profit from the unsuspecting user. Through this mult-media installation, we attempt to make visible the implicit conventions that are imposed on users while being manipulated into giving unpaid laborer. With the permeation of AI, we have become complacent in volunteering our labour through the commercialization, popularization and glamorization of consumer tech that creates the illusion of capability and power. While this modern technology holds up the facade of an adept, powerful, and neutral tool meant to serve the user, the technology we interact with is always embedded with values, character traits, and fictional backgrounds to create a marketable product with a personality. It functions less as a neutral tool with advanced capabilities and more as a product embedded with opaque motives operating behind a facade not clearly understood by the user.
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Presented in a staged office space, I’m Honoured To Serve uses the language of advertising and design to bring viewers back in time to the late 20th century where there was hope, excitement, and the promise of freedom by tech developers. Deisinger and Hodgson aim to uncover this illusion with Maeve, a Digital AI Assistant that functions as a disjointed and aloof character that manifests the jarring reality of personalizing technology. Viewers are welcomed to sit and observe the interview between Maeve and her potential future employer. Responses from Maeve are directly sourced from Google Assistant to critically investigate the values, character traits, fictional backgrounds and stock questions and answers developers have embedded into them. This interaction reminds us that the developer’s motive is to create a marketable product that convinces users to volunteer their data, coaxing them to understand the technology through an often distorted lens. While early computing technology companies simply sold tools to would-be users, the user’s role has become more complicated with companies’ shift towards selling the user as the product, harvested from a sea of data. In referencing late 20th-century technology, I’m Honoured to Serve contrasts our vague and dynamic understanding of the producer-consumer relationship with the emergence of big data and AI. This project was made possible by the AI & Society Initiative, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as the Engineering Faculty and Arts Faculty of the University of Ottawa.
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Presented in a staged office space, I’m Honoured To Serve uses the language of advertising and design to bring viewers back in time to the late 20th century where there was hope, excitement, and the promise of freedom by tech developers. Deisinger and Hodgson aim to uncover this illusion with Maeve, a Digital AI Assistant that functions as a disjointed and aloof character that manifests the jarring reality of personalizing technology. Viewers are welcomed to sit and observe the interview between Maeve and her potential future employer. Responses from Maeve are directly sourced from Google Assistant to critically investigate the values, character traits, fictional backgrounds and stock questions and answers developers have embedded into them. This interaction reminds us that the developer’s motive is to create a marketable product that convinces users to volunteer their data, coaxing them to understand the technology through an often distorted lens. While early computing technology companies simply sold tools to would-be users, the user’s role has become more complicated with companies’ shift towards selling the user as the product, harvested from a sea of data. In referencing late 20th-century technology, I’m Honoured to Serve contrasts our vague and dynamic understanding of the producer-consumer relationship with the emergence of big data and AI. This project was made possible by the AI & Society Initiative, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as the Engineering Faculty and Arts Faculty of the University of Ottawa.
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Project: A Tool to Touch With
Location: Ottawa, Ontario
2021, wood, plastic bristles, and cotton rope, 9” in diameter.
Details: This project explores a friendship between an AI named Zane and a gardener. Through this relationship, the project reflects upon the human as a teacher of slowness in the face of hyper-productivity. This relationship raises questions of epistemology, mind-body relations, collaboration with the non-human and current economic ideals in contrast with the values of care, slowness, and connection to the ecosystem.
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Presented in this project is the journal kept by the gardener through this interaction, and a tool built in collaboration between the AI and the gardener. Through their budding friendship and teachings, the AI attempts to develop a tool that allows it to experience and understand the principles that the gardener has been describing to the AI. This tool is an attempt to teach the experience of feeling the dirt and engaging physically with the earth; a satisfying feeling of closeness to the material world. This project does not answer whether the experience is properly translated to the AI, but rather seeks to answer how we should try to understand our relationship with the ecosystems of the world in the face of failing economic ideals of individualism and technochauvinism.* As a step in the dialectical relationship between human and AI, we can come to better know ourselves in opposition to technology, and vice versa.
* “Technochauvinism is the assumption that computers are superior to people, or that a technological solution is superior to any other.” - Meredith Broussard
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Project: Global Affairs Canada
Location: Ottawa, Ontario
2020
Artists: Jennifer Macklem, Willem Deisinger and Devansh Shaw.
Details: Global Affairs Canada selected our team to design and build a sculpture that worked with data recently published by the Global Affairs team. It was able to communicate a narrative of diversity, integration and the building of knowledge to inspire generations of empathy.
University of Ottawa article on the project
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Project: Global Affairs Canada
Location: Ottawa, Ontario
2020
Artists: Jennifer Macklem, Willem Deisinger and Devansh Shaw.
Details: Global Affairs Canada selected our team to design and build a sculpture that worked with data recently published by the Global Affairs team. It was able to communicate a narrative of diversity, integration and the building of knowledge to inspire generations of empathy.
University of Ottawa article on the project
