AI LAB Radio #4: Birgitte Aga & Coral Manton

From the perspective of 13 major cultural operators in Europe (Ars Electronica, Center for Promotion of Science, Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation, Laboral, Kapelica Gallery, Science Gallery Dublin, Onassis Cultural Center, The Culture Yard / clickfestival, GLUON, Hexagone Scène Nationale Arts Sciences, SOU Festival, le lieu unique, Waag), the AI LAB centers visions, expectations and fears that we associate with the conception of a future, all-encompassing artificial intelligence. Through an extensive activity programme in the form of exhibitions, labs, workshops, conferences, talks, performances, concerts and residencies the project fosters interdisciplinary work, transnational mobility and intercultural exchange. In our Radio show we will give insight into projects by different female artists whose work focuses on the topic of AI, bias and/or gender.

Birgitte Aga (NO) & Coral Manton (UK)

The work of artist-technologist duo Birgitte Aga and Coral Manton manifests as collaborative workshops, events and installations aimed at(re)claiming conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems as a medium for protest. It critiques the commercial pursuit of humanising AI technologies and challenges the bias, stereotyping and pervasive influence embedded within. By activating the public, Aga and Manton re-write and re-imagine the cultural myths of AI and robotics, creating alternative technology-mediated futures.
Their most recent work is Women Reclaiming Ai (2019), an expanding activist art-work, presented as a feminist AI voice assistant, programmed through workshops by a growing community of self-identifying women, and The Infinite Guide (2018), a speculative art work and research project, powered by a conversational AI, (LSTM Recurrent Neural Net), trained on a biased and non-diverse data-set.

In this show Coral and Birgitte introduce their most recent works of art and explain why we as humans are biased, not the technology itself. They tell us why humour is an important tool for protest and for demystifying or concepts of artificial intelligence. They give insights in their playful and thoughtful ways for demonstrating the underrepresentation of women in the development process of AI. In the end our talk even leads to a very speculative question: “What does it mean to be human?”

Find more information about Birgitte Aga and Coral Manton on their websites:
https://coralmanton.com/
https://birgitteaga.com/

The AI Lab is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.