*35C3 preroll music*
Herald Angel: The next talk will be given by Régine Debatty and she will be talking
about the goods the strange and the ugly in art and science technology in 2018. Big
applause to Régine
*Applause*
*Sound from video*
Régine: This was not supposed to happen, I am sorry. Hello everyone. So my
name is Régine Debatty. I'm an art critic and blogger. Since 2004 I've been writing
"we make money not art" which is a blog that looks at the way artists, designers
and hackers are using science and technology in a critical and socially
engaged way. So a few weeks ago some of the organizers of the Congress e-mailed me
and they asked me if I could give a kind of overview of the most exciting and
interesting works in art and technology in 2018. And on Monday when I started working
on my slides I was really on a mission to deliver and then we had the intention
to give an overview of the best of art and tech in 2018. But somehow things got
out of hand. I started inserting words that are a bit older and also I could see
a kind of narrative that emerged. So the result is going to be a
presentation where I will still show some of the works I found very interesting over
this past year. But they're going to be embedded into a broader narrative. And this
narrative is going to look at the way artists nowadays are using science and
technology to really explore and expand the boundaries and the limits of the human
body. But also they use science and technology to challenge intelligence or at least the
understanding we have of human intelligence. So Exhibit 1 it's "Face
Detected". It's actually I wouldn't say it was one of my favorites work from 2018
but it's definitely by one of my favorite artists. So that's why it's in
there. So the setting is quite easy to understand. Thérise Deporter, that's the name of the artist
had a solo show a couple of months ago at the New Art Space in Andover and
install these blocks of clay on tables and then invited artists sculpters
to come and do portraits of people and start shaping their head. And of course
you know the process was followed by the audience but it was also
followed by face recognition software. And as soon as the software had detected a
face in the sculpture the Artist would receive a message that say: Stop, we
have detected a human face. And what is interesting is that
*laughter*
there are several - I mean, there's worse -
According to the face recognition system
- because they work with different parameters and they've been programmed by
different programmers so they don't necessarily - they're not as fast as, some
are faster than others to recognize a face, some have different parameters than
others. So that's why the results are always so different. But the reason why I
found this project worth mentioning is because it shows the increasingly big
space that is called artificial intelligence. You can call it algorithm,
big data or software. It shows the increasingly big role that systems and
machines are taking into culture and the place they're taking into spheres that
until not so long ago we thought were really the apanage and exclusivity of
humans. So for example creativity, innovation, imagination and art. And
nowadays pretty banal I mean no one is going to be surprised if you're listening
to music and someone tells you: Oh it's the music that's being composed
actually by an algorithm or this is a poem or a book that's been written
by a machine. I mean it's becoming almost mainstream. And this is happening
also in the world of visual art. And we've had a few examples this year. If you look
at the newspaper like if a mainstream newspaper or we had regularly news
saying oh this algorithmic has made this masterpiece. And one of the most recent
example was this stunning portrait of a gentleman that made the headlines because
it was the first portrait that was made by an algorithm that was sold at Christie's
And Christie's is a famous auction house. And it also made the headlines not only
because he was the first one but it sold for a surprisingly high price like
something like forty times the original estimate. This painting made by an
algorithm created by a Paris based collective. So it sold for almost half a
million dollar. And if I have to be honest with you I cannot think of any work that's
been mostly done by an algorithm that have really impressed me and move me. But it
seems that I am in the minority because you might have heard of this. These
scientific experiments where computer scientists at Rutgers University in USA.
They made this program that could replicate just make and invent abstract
paintings. And then they asked people like human beings to have a look at the
paintings made by the computer. But they mixed it, like I said they were showing
to people they mix it with paintings that had really been done by human beings that
had been exhibited at the famous art fair Art Basel. And they asked them how they react
and which one according to them had been done by a human. And it turned out
that people responded fairly well to the paintings that had been done by this
computer system. They tended to prefer them. They found them this odd. They
described them as being more communicative and more inspiring. So you know maybe one day
I will be impressed but so far I would say I would not be worried if I were an
artist. I'm not going to say to artists or you know very soon machines are going to
take your job. Well maybe if you make that kind of painting yeah maybe you should be
worried. But the kind of artist I'm interested in. I really don't like it.
Artists I'm interested in. I really trust them to keep on challenging computer
system. I trust them to explore and collaborate with them and use them to
expand their artistic range. And most of all I trust them to keep on sabotaging
and hacking and subverting these computer systems. And so yeah I'm not worried at
all for artists but maybe I should be worried for art critic. Because a few years
ago so it's 2006 and even in the artificial intelligence time it's really
really old. So in 2006 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris an artist was showing a program
that was generated automatically. Text written by art critique and I'm sorry but
the example is in French. But if you read French. And if you use the kind of
press releases and "blah" they give you that had been written by art critique. It is
really the kind of thing they work. It is so incredible you know it's the kind of
inflated rhetoric and uses of vague terms and also constantly referencing some fancy
French philosopher. So it really really worked. So personally I would be more
worried for my job than for the job of the artist. Anyway this is another work I
really like in 2018 and it's one of these work that challenges and play and
try to subvert artificial intelligence and in particular the so-called intelligent or
home assistance which is Alexa or Siri. So you may know the artist is Mediengruppe
Bitnik. They collaborated with a DJ and electronic music composer called Low Jack
and they made an album to be played exclusively for Alexa and Siri all this
kind of devices. And we listen to a track in a moment. And what did the
music does is, it tries to interact and make Alexa react. So it asked
questions to Alex. It gives order to Alex or Siri or whatever it's called. And
it's also trying to express and convey and communicate to these devices the kind of
anxieties and ease and doubts they have the artists have. And some of us have
around these so-called intelligent home assistant. Whether it's they're frightened
about the encroachment of privacy and unreliability and the fact that they are
called smart. So that we kind became of lower guard and implicitly start to trust
them. So I'm going to make you listen to one of the tracks. There are three of them
- at least they sent me three of them. Played music track: Hello!
*music*
High speed intelligent personal assistance all listening to everything I say. I brought
you into my home. You scary. Alexa, Prime's new in time is now and all forever.
*music*
Alexa, I used to bark commands on you. Now I say "please" and "thank you". Never mess with
someone who knows your secrets. Siri, there is no way far enough to hide. Ok,
Google - are you laughing at me? You used to answer that. Now, you disengage. Never
enough digital street smarts to outsmart Alexa. Alexa? Alexa? Hey, Alexiety, I want
my control back. I want my home back. Siri, delete my calender. Siri, hold my
calls. Siri, delete my contacts. Ok, Google, what's the loneliest number? Ok,
Google, stop! Ok, Google, stop! Ok, Google. Hello! Please, stop. Alexa, help!
Alexa, disable Uber. Alexa, disable lighting. Alexa, disable Amazon music
unlimited. Alexa, quit! Hey, Siri! Activate airplane mode. If you need me,
I'll be offline, in the real world. R: And that's it for this one.
*Next track playing*
R: Oh, my god, what is this? That is why...? *laughing* My boyfriend is
watching, he's doing to love so much. Yeah, let's be serious with a bit of art
and tech, shall we? So, there are two reasons why this work is interesting. The
first one is that you don't really need to have one of these devices at home to have
fun because it's been actually conceived to be played as loud as
possible. So, you don't need to have to have one of these devices but you
can put the music very loud, open the window and hopefully it is going to
interact with the devices of your neighbors and mess a bit with their
domesticity. The other thing that is
interesting is that of course Alexa has been designed to appear as close to a
human as possible. So each time the record is asking some question the answer going
to change slightly because it's the way it's been programmed. Then also because
each time there is an update in the program and so might change. And also as I
said the artist made this record to communicate their doubts and anxieties
around this smart system because there's a few problems around these systems. One of
them is as I'm sure you know it's about surveillance because they come
with corporate systems of surveillance that are embedded into the hardware. And
the software. And we may not realize it until, you know, sometimes when you open -
one day we opened the pages of a newspaper and this is a story that appeared on the
Verge a few days ago and it's the story of a German citizen who e-mailed Amazon and
say look Amazon I want to know all the data you've collected about me over these
past few years. And then you received these data except that he received the
wrong data. He received 1700 Alexa voice recordings but he doesn't have an Alexa.
These were not his data. So he wrote back to Amazon and says "Oh look I think there
is a problem there". Amazon never answered back. So what did the guy do? He went to a
German newspaper and the reporters managed to analyze the data. And they managed to
identify who the original owner of the data was and who his girlfriend is and who
his circle of friends is. And you know if you couple all the data from Alexa with
what is already available for everyone to see on Facebook and other forms of social
media, you get kind of a scary and worrying picture so you understand why artists and
other people might be worried and anxious around Alexa. And so they're called smart
or intelligent devices, but sometimes they give us advices that may not be, that I
would say, judicious and smart, such as the one you might have heard of "Alexa's
advice to kill your foster parents". And also they don't necessarily react to the
person they're supposed to obey. So that like almost every month there is a story
in the newspaper. So this is the story of Rocco the parrot and Rocco really when
he's alone at home and his owner has left it's singing - it imitates very well.
There are videos of Rocco imitating the voice of Alexa, it's really kinny. But
he also plays his older like, it doesn't want to but, for example, he added to the
Amazon shopping basket of its owner broccoli and watermelons and kites and ice
cream. And there are stories like that all the time in the newspaper, when the TV
presenter talks about, say, "Okay Google something or Alexa do something", and if
people are watching the TV and Alexa is in the room Alexa is going to perform this
action or order some goods online. So as you see this so-called smart system
isn't smart enough to differentiate between the actual human being that's in
the room and that they should obey or they should answer to, and voices that come
through the radio or the TV or the voices of the pet. So if on the one hand
intelligent machines can be confused, I have the feeling that also as human being
we are confused when it comes to, you know, as soon as you throw in the arena
the words artificial intelligence, most people, not you I'm sure, but most people
are ready to believe the hype. And a good example of that, I would say, is you know
we keep reading how in China they have this super sophisticated and highly
efficient networks of surveillance of CCTV. And how they have face recognition systems
that are really really high hand and highly sophisticated. So that is the
theory but the reality is that the technology has limitations and also
limitations linked to bureaucracy and some of the data in the files I've seen not
been digitalized. So sometimes the work of the police is not aided by sophisticated
CCTV and their face recognition software, but just consists of going through old
people files and photos. And yet, maybe that doesn't matter if you know if the
system is not fully functional, because in the case of surveillance what matters is
that we think that we might at some point be under the gaze of surveillance that
might be enough to keep us docile and compliant. Also, we are being told that
very soon we just have to wait for them to be launched on the market. We're going to
have some fantastic autonomous car that's going to drive us seamlessly from one part
of the town to the other one. And in reality, we are still training them, you
and I, when we get these pop up images and we are asked by the system to identify all
the squares where there is a shop window, where there is a traffic sign or where
there is another vehicle. Where I want to go with this is that there is still a lot
of human beings, a lot of human clocks behind the machines, because artificial
intelligence is nothing without data, and data is pretty useless if it's not been
targged. And so you see the emergence of data tagging factory in China and it's
actually the new faces of outsourcing in China, where you have people who spend the
whole day behind computer screen adding dots and descriptions to images and
photo. And so artificial intelligence that was supposed to, you know, free us from
very monotonous, mind-numbing and boring work is still generating for us a lot of
this boring work. And these invisible people behind artificial intelligence is
what Amazon, which is Amazon Mechanical Turk, but it's what Amazon call
artificial intelligence. Some could photo mission, and some of the characteristic of
this hidden human labor for the digital factory is that it's, one, the
hyper fragmentation of the work and because it's like the work is divided in
small chunks, it's loses a lot of his prestige, a lot of its value, so people
are underpaid and what is a bit frightening is that this kind of work
culture is actually creeping into the world of creative people and freelancing
and you have platforms such as this one, called Fiverr where it's also a
crowdsourcing platform where you can buy the services of a person who is going to
design for you the logo of your new company, or a birthday card, or a business
card, or do translation for you or shoot a testimonial for your products and there is
one example there and someone who advertise that they will design for you two
magnificent logos in 48 hours. And the price that's it at five dollars, that's
very low - and the characteristic of this kind of company is this scale of
crowdsourcing so-called services is that they ruthlessly rely on precarity and
Fiverr recently had these ads, where they were basically glorifying the idea of
working yourself to death. And then this. Well I'm going to the third work I really
like in 2018. It was released a few months ago. It's a work by Michael Mandiberg and
he wanted to make a portrait of the hidden human being behind the digital factory.
And to do so he really wanted to recreate or to modernized the iconic film by Charlie
Chaplin. Modern Times. It's a film from 1936 which was you know it was the seventh
year of the Great Depression. People were struggling, being unemployed,
starving and having difficulty to get through life. And Michael Mandiberg made an
update of this film, by... First of all he wrote the code and the code cut the film
of Charlie Chaplin into very short clips of a few seconds and then Michael
Mandiberg contacted people. He found people on this platform on
Fiverr and he asked them, he gave each of them a short clip. And
he asked them to recreate it as well as they could. And that's what they did.
And Michael Mandiberg, I'm going to show an extract. Yeah you will see, he had no
obviously no control over the location, he had no control about around the production
choice. So hopefully I'm going to find the correct video and not a fitness video.
So here's an extract.
*music plays*
I think you've got the point here. Good. So with this work Michael Mandiberg tried
to do a kind of portrait of these hidden digital factory and of its human clocks
But the portrait is done by the freelancers, by the workers themselves and
you can see the result is kind of messy and chaotic geographically disperse
and hyper-fragmented. So that it's added characteristic, of the digital factory. So
carrying on with the world that is hidden, I'd like to speak briefly about social
media content moderators. Maybe you know this story because imagine that in
Germany, I was listening to an interview with a woman who had work as a social
media content moderator for Facebook in Germany and she was explaining what kind
of work she was doing. It doesn't happen very often that you have testimony, because
usually the worker have to sign a nondisclosure agreement. But she was
explaining that, how difficult the work is because every single day, each of the
moderator has to go to 1300 tickets. So 1300 cases of content that have been
flagged as inappropriate or disturbing, either automatically or by another users.
So you know that doesn't leave a lot of time to have a thorough analysis.
And indeed she was explaining that human reflection is absolutely not encouraged and
that you have all the process of judging, you have only a few seconds to
judge whether or not the content has to be blocked or you could stay on
Facebook. And all the process of the reflection is actually reduced to a series
of automatisms. And the interesting part for me was when she was explaining that at
night she was still dreaming of her work, but where some of her co-workers were dreaming
of the kind of horrible content they have to moderate, she was explaining how she was
actually dreaming of doing the same automatic gesture over and over again. And
that's how you realized, that all these big companies, they wish they could replace
workers by machines, by algorithm, by robots. But some of the tasks
unfortunately the robots or the algorithm cannot do them yet. So they have
to rely on human being with all the other unreliability and propension
to contest and rebell and maybe laziness and all their human defects. So
the solution they found was to. Sorry? Okay I thought someone had asked me
something. Where was I? So the solution, yeah solution they found was to reduce
these people to machines and automate their work as much as possible. And so
that's the work as a Facebook content moderator. And just as is apparent as you
can see how their work ambience and environment is different from the fancy
and glamorous image we see in architecture magazine, each time one of these big media
companies will open up headquarters somewhere in the world. But anyway to come
back to the work of Facebook content moderator I think the way the work is
automated can be compared to the way the work of the employees in Amazon warehouses
are being automated. As you know they have to wear this kind of mini-
computer on their wrist that identifies them, that tracks them, that give them all
the... monitor them, measure their productivity in real time. And also like,
allows Amazon to really remote control them and so they work in a pretty
alienating environment. Sometimes popup online pretend that Amazon they feel this
one is particularly creepy, because they were thinking of having, of, you know,
making this wrist computer even more sophisticated and using haptic
feedback so that they could direct and remote control even more precisely the
hands of the worker. So you see there is this big push towards in certain contexts
towards turning humans into robots. And you know we're always mentioning Amazon,
but this is the kind of work culture that is being adopted elsewhere in France, but
also in other European countries. There are services such as the Auchan Drive. So
if you're a customer and you don't want to go to the supermarket to do your
groceries, you do your groceries online and 10 minutes later you arrive on the
parking lot of your supermarket and someone will be there with your grocery
bags ready. And I was listening to testimonies by people who used to work
at Auchan Drive and as you can see they wear all the same microcomputer
that is also monitoring precisely all their movement. And the thing that I found
most disturbing was when they were explaining, that they don't, when they get
the list of of items they have to pick up, they don't get you know a list that say
you have to take three bananas and two packs of soy milk. No they just get
numbers that say good to this alley another number that say this is
the shelf where you have to take the item and the number corresponding to the
precise item on the shelf. And they also they are submitted to very strict rules of
being as fast as possible and I shouldn't laugh, but they were explaining the kind
of if they rebelled the kind of vengeance their boss would have. And if they are
particularly rebellious, they send them into frozen food so they spend the day in
the cold. And I'd like to have a sharp look with you at people who also want to
be closer to machines and robots. But according to their own terms and they want
to have total control over it and it's something they do voluntarily and it's the
community of so-called grinders. So these people who don't hesitate to slice open
their body to put, insert chips and devices and magnets, into it to either
facilitate their life or expand their range of perception. And actually the
first time I heard about about them was at the Chaos Communication Congress back a
long time ago in 2006 when a journalist Quinn Norton had installed a magnet under
her fingers and she could sense the electromagnetic fields. I found that very
fascinating. But as you can see the aestetic is, it's pretty rough and gritty.
It's very, it's a vision of a world to come and of a communion with the machine
that is completely aesthetically it's very different from the one that you saw by the
Silicon Valley. But I find it equally fascinating how they take control of the
way they want technology to be closer to technology. Yes. So in the third part of
my talk, the first part was about this confusion we have between the intelligence
of machine and human intelligence. The second part was about the robotisation of
the human body. And the third and last part I would like to have a look
and I don't know the type of hybridisation of bodies, but this time not between the human body
and the machine, but human body and other animal species. So we may have actually
been tinkering with their bodies for decades since the 60s when they started
taking the contraceptive pills and also people going through want to change
gender, they also tinker with their body and the first transgender celebrity I
recently found out was George Jorgensen Jr. who started his adult life as a G.I.
during World War 2 and ended his life as a female entertainer in the US. And while
assembling the slides I could not resist adding this one because I saw it a couple
of weeks ago in an exhibition - the World Press Photo Exhibition. And it's a photo
that was taken in Taiwan and Taiwan is actually, it is a major on of the top
tourist destination for medicine. People fly to Taiwan because you get, you can get
very good health care and and pretty affordable surgery. And one of the hot
niche in surgery for this kind of tourist is actually gender reassignment surgery.
So in this photo you have, the operation is finished and the surgeon is showing to
the patient her new vagina. And before undergoing this surgery the
patient of course had to go through a course of... had to take hormones and
series of hormones and one of them is estrogen and estrogen is the primarily
sex female hormone, it's the hormone responsible for the feminization of the
body and also sometimes of the emotion. And, if you are a guy in the room you're
probably thinking, well I'm going to leave the room because I don't care about
estrogen. What does it have to do with me? And I'm going to spend the next few
minutes trying to convince you that you should you should care about estrogen.
Because even fish care about estrogen it turns out. At least the biologist. You
might have heard a few years ago that biology started to get very worrying
because they discovered that some fish population, especially the male ones, were
getting feminized that their sexual organs were both sometimes male and female and
they were worried about it and they discovered that it was the result of
contact with xenoestrogen. And xenoestrogen, everywhere in the
environment, and they affect not only fish but all animal species including human
species. So when I say that they are everywhere in the environment, it's really
everywhere - only 10 minutes - They are very often the result of industrial
process so for example you can find them in recycled plastic, in lacquers, in beauty
products, in products you use to clean the house, in wheat killers, insecticides, in
PVC, they are pretty much everywhere. Sometimes they are released by
industries into the watersteam and I wanted to show you again abstract art.
It's a work by Juliette Bonneviot, and she was really interested in these
xenoestrogens. So she looked around her in the environment where they were present
then and she took all these, some of these xenoestrogen sources I've just mentioned
and she separated them according to colors and then she crush them and turn them into
powder. They then mixed them with PVC and silicone which also contain xenoestrogens
and then pulled them onto canvas and then you have this kind of portrait of the
silent colonizing chemicals that is modifying our body and the kind of things
they can do to the human body have already been observed. So they're linked to higher
cases of cancer for both men and women, lowering of IQ, problems in fertility,
early onset of puberty, etc. So we should really be more vigilant around
xenoestrogen and in the next few minutes I'd like to mention briefly two projects
where women artist exploring how their hormones, more general their female
body can be used to have other kinds of relationships with non-human animals.
So the first is a project by Ai Hasegawa, she was in her early 30s and she had that
dilemma. She thought maybe, maybe it's time to have a child but do I really want
to have a child because it's a lot of responsibility and there is already
overpopulation. But on the other hand if I don't have a child it means that all these
painful periods would have been there in vain. She was also faced with another
dilemma, is that she really likes to eat endangered species and in particular
dolphin and shark and whales and so on the one hand she liked eating them. And on the
other hand she realized that she was contributing to their disappearance and
the fact that their extinct. So she found this solution, and this is a speculative
project, but she saw it as a solution maybe she could give birth to an
endangered species, So maybe she could become the surrogate mother of a dolphin.
So using her belly as a kind of incubator for another animal and to do this she
consulted with an expert in synthetic biology and an expert in obstetric who
told her that technically it's possible, that she would just have to resort to
synthetic biology to modify the placenta of the baby. She would not have to modify
our own body but she just had to modify the placenta of the baby to be sure
that all the nutrients and the hormones and the oxygen and everything is
communicated between the mother and the baby except the antibodies because they
could damage the body. So in a scenario, even if everything goes well, she gives
birth will lovely healthy baby Maui dolphin. And she gives it the
antibodies through fat milk containing these antibodies and she see grow. And
once it's an adult he could be released with a chip and under its skin. And then
when once it's fished she can buy it and eat it and have it again inside her own
body. Well, when I first heard about the project, I can tell you I was not
laughing. I said it was really really revolting. But the more I thought about,
it the smarter I saw this project was, because I understand it doesn't sadly make
a lot of sense to give birth to yet another human being that is going to put
strain on this planet. So why not dedicate your reproductive system to the
environment and use it to help save endanger species. And I have five minutes
left so I have to make some really really drastic choices. I wanted to talk about
Maja Smrekar. I'm going to do it. So she had a series of projects, where she is
exploring the core evolution of dogs and human and to make it very very brief. One
of her performances consisted in spending four months in a flat in Berlin with her
two dogs. One of them is an adult Byron and the other one is a puppy called Ada.
And she tricked her body by some physiological training and also by eating
certain food and using a breast pump. She treats her body to stimulate the hormone
that make the body of a woman lactate, even if she wasn't pregnant, so that she
could breastfeed her puppy. And these two projects I saw, were really are really
interesting, because it shows the power of the female body. It shows that what
prevents women from having this kind of transgender motherhood isn't is that
technology. It's just it's just society and the kind of limits that our culture is
bringing on what woman can or should do with her body. And I also like this
project, because the kind of question our anthropocentrism and our tendency to think
that all the resources of the world are made for us and not for other living creatures.
So just as a parent this if you're interested in estrogen and xenoestrogen
I would recommend that you have a look at the talk that Mary Maggic give last
year had the Chaos Communication Congress where she was talking about estrogen and
then linked the history and links to her work as a biohacker. So now my
conclusion... maybe you're already wondering why is she talking to us about artificial
intelligence and transspecies motherhood? What does it have to do with each other? I
would say a lot! Because we have the feeling that the digital world sometimes
we tend to forget that behind it there is a material world that to have
artificial intelligence. You need the infrastructure, you need the devices,
you need the server farm, you need spaces to manage these data. Physical spaces.
And I would say it's a bit like the human brain. The human brain is kind in dimensions
pretty small, but apparently it's it eats up a fifth of all the energy that our body
consume. And so that means that artificial intelligence is, it needs like a very
heavy infrastructure, energy, hungry, server farms and I'm sure you've seen all
the PR stunts and the press releases of Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. promising
you that they're transitioning that they're going to use green energy, but the
energy is not still green and they're still using a lot of fossil fuel to pull out.
Their server farms to make the devices that we use. We still need minerals that
have to be dug up from the ground, sometimes in really horrible conditions.
This is the coltan mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The minerals we
use, well, they are not infinite and, unless and it's not for tomorrow, unless we
go and get these minerals in the asteroid or in the deep sea. We are going to get
into trouble very very fast and I don't have the time for this one. But trust me
the resources are not infinite. And then, refind them and produce them. That's very
very damaging for the environment. Yes. So I have the feeling sometimes that we are a
bit like the golfers in this image, that when I go to some, not all of them, but
some tech conference or art and tech conferences, I have the feeling that we
are kind of complacent and that we have our vision of the future may be a bit
narrow minded and maybe that's normal. I guess it's like, if you go to
someone who's working as a fancy job at Silicon Valley and you ask him: "What's
your vision of tomorrow? What's your vision of the future?" And then you ask
the same question to someone else, for example is an activist for Greenpeace. Then
we have a completely different perspective, a very different answer of
what the future might be. So sometimes I'm wondering also, if we are not too obsessed
with the technology and to obsess with what I would call a techno feats. This
tendency we have to see a problem and to think, if we throw more technology on top
of it we are going to solve it. Even if the problem has been created in the first
place by technology. So, that's why we get extremely excited and I do get excited
about the perspective that when they maybe will get a baby mammoth that will be
resurrected. And at the same time we don't take care of the species that are
getting instincts, you know every single day every 24 hours. There are something
like between 150 and 200 types of plants, animals, insects that get disappeared and
we'll never see again. Every single day they disappear around the world. And yet
we still get excited about the idea of resurrecting the baby mammoth, the
passenger pigeon or dodo, we still create and breed creature, so that we can exploit
them even better. Should we be looking forward to a lab grown meat that is
promised. I mean we are told that is going to be cruelty-free and guilt-free, where it
has in reality they are not totally guilt- free and cruelty-free. And I don't think so that
they are the best solution to solved the horrible impact that the meat industry is
having on the environment, on our health and on the well-being of animals. I mean
there is a solution. It's not the sexy one. It's not a tricky one. It's to
adapt to plain plant based diet and I managed to do a bit of vegan propaganda
here. Should we get excited, because there are few vegan in the room. Should we get
excited, because someone in Japan has made some tiny drones with, on top of it, it's
horse hair that they're used to pollinate flowers, because everywhere around the
world the population of bees is collapsing and that is very bad for our food system.
So should we, should we use geo engineering to solve our climate trouble.
And at the end with these slides of what this for me ours, I see you know the
service, which is for me the really the embodiment of techno feats. So, you
probably know that California has gone through some very bad period of dry
weather, so rich people wake up and they see that the grass on their magnificent
lawn is yellow instead of being green. So, now in California you have services where
you can call someone and they will just, you know, fix the problem by painting the
grass in green. So there you have it and, you know, fuck you Anthropocene and global
warming, my lawn is green!
*applause*
Okay so this how this why I wanted to bring all these really contrasting visions
together because we might have different visions of the future but at some point
they will have to dialogue because we have only one humanity and one planet. And I'm
very very bad that at conclusion. So I wrote it down. So the artist whose work
made in 2018 a truly exciting year for me not the artist will showcase the
magic and the wonders of science and technology. They are the artists who bring
to the table realistic complex and sometimes also difficult conversation
about the future whether it is the future of technology, the future of men, or the
future of other forms of life and other forms of intelligence. They are the
artists who try and establish a dialogue between the organic, the digital and the
mineral because they're all part of our world and we cannot go on pretending that
they don't affect each other. Thank you so much.
*Applause*
Herald: Thank you Régine for the very interesting times. Bit confusing talk
about - I'm still thinking about the dolphin part, but anyway. But by the way
there's this grass painting thing is maybe it's something that I can apply to
my house. Okay. We have questions at microphone 2, I guess. So let's start
there. Question: Hi. I have a question on a
particular part at the beginning you talked about AI in arts and you mentioned
that there are no AI programs that draw pictures or run texts but have you heard
about AI developing ideas for say an art installation?
Régine: Yes as a matter of fact I think tonight... I mean, if you're going to program
and you may maybe tonight or tomorrow night there is a talk by Maria and
Nicole. There two artists and I think that the title might be Disnovation
and I think you might like what they present. I don't know what they're
going to present but what I know is that one of their work... I forget the name... if
they're in the room that would be fantastic. But they had a project where
they have a bot. It's on Twitter and it's going through some blogs and newspaper
about creativity and also about technology and using all these data to
generate really crazy stupid title for installation . And then the artist
challenge other artists to take these tweets which are really crazy and make an
installation out of it. So that's a kind of a tricky way of AI being used
for installation I'm sure. Like right now I cannot think of about
anything else but I mean if you want you can write me and when my brain
is switched on back, probably I'll have other ideas.
Herald: OK. Any more questions. I don't see any.... Ah, there over there.
Microphone 4 please. Question: Yeah. I was wondering if, well.
there's probably more certain that we're developing to more suppose human race
because we simply have to do to climate change. There are also developments right
now that when relatively short term we would go to Mars and in a sort of sense do
we need to do to fight the human race for possible multiple planets and with modern
human modification. Régine: Okay, I didn't understand the
question. Herald: So, please repeat.
Question: So in general we're going to a human... both human race that definitely...
we're not able to survive on this planet for that long anymore. Really optimistic.
I am vegan so yay. And we have some new developments going on that we'll
be able to go to Mars relatively soon. Régine: I don't believe it. Who is going
to want to go to that planet like seriously, like it's going to be like
Australia we are going to send prisoners and criminals there. Who wants to be like
Like come on. Yeah. Anyway now I see what you mean. I think I'm kind of
more optimistic about the future than you are. I think we can still survive
on this planet even if we get very numerous. We just have to find another
way to consume and take care of each other. But maybe this my feminine side
talking. Question: Maybe in general without a lot
of modification to the human beings it's simply not possible.
Certainly. I think that's a common ground. And yeah I sort of wish we didn't need a
planet B but I think we do. Régine: Well I hope I'd be dead when that
comes. That's my philosophy sometimes. Okay.
Herald: I don't see any more questions so let's thank the speaker again. Thank you.
*Applause*
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