Show Case #1 

Artificial Intelligems #1, 2021


Introducing the project

Introducing the project

Artificial Intelligems is an artistic research project exploring AI within contemporary jewellery practice. By experimenting with Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, this project investigates AI as artistic output, collaborative design tool, and exhibition format, among other. What potential as well as threats does AI offer for jewellery as a discipline and discourse? Furthermore, what roles can the domain of jewellery play in making use of and, moreover, challenging these technologies? Through an open call, more than a hundred jewellery artists and designers submitted images of their works, and nearly a thousand images are used to ‘feed’ the ML algorithm. What will the output look like? How will that change our perspective on jewellery? Does experimenting with this technology offer new insights into how jewellery can be made, shown, worn, experienced? How can human and non-human intelligent systems learn from each other? By generating collectively created ornamutations, this project aims to trigger reflective and speculative conversations on the critical and bold perspectives it proposes for contemporary jewellery. 

Munich Jewellery Week 2021

Munich Jewellery Week 2021 

Artificial Intelligems will be presented during Munich Jewellery Week through an online event consisting of live dreaming sessions and a series of reflective talks (11th till 14th of March). During these live dreaming sessions, the algorithm* envisions a flow of constantly transforming, blending, glowing jewellery, based upon the 969 images of jewellery it was trained with, sent in by 124 artists! Generating these ‘ornamutations’ in real-time, the project urges to reflect upon making processes, wearability, materiality, tactility, value, authorship, human-centered design… It's the first time that our collectively created, living, multidimensional jewellery will be shown! Join us for this experience via Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/artificial_intelligems

 Hypnotized by the algorithm we indulge in speculative reflections. A series of talks on Machine Learning and jewellery practice contextualizes the project and offers insights into the research. These informal conversations encourage to share perspectives and learn from each other. By bringing together voices from various domains - jewellery, philosophy, biology, mathematics, and software engineering - we are looking for fresh and critical perspectives on AI and the exciting challenges it has to offer for contemporary artistic practice. A warm welcome to dive into vivid interactive dialogues with us, or just to drop in and listen (Zoom links below!). 

* As this Field Guide to Making AI Art Responsibly points out, it is considered best practice to share the software you're working with. We started from this Stylegan algorithm and developed the code further within the context of this project. 

Program and links

Program 

THU 11.03, 19:45 - with Prof. Tobias Rees

THU 11.03 - Day 1 ‘INPUT’: on artificiality, intelligence, being human, (hyper)reality, and newness with Prof. Tobias Rees 

Starting with the dreaming session at 19:45 (CET), followed by the talk

Are there distinctions between human and machine intelligence? 🤖 Does AI shift what it means to be human? And, what impact could this have on jewellery? How can we go from human-centered to interactive and collaborative approaches with various intelligent systems? 👾 What are the relationships between ‘artificial’ and ‘real’, and what roles do images play herein? Can Machine Learning envision a new jewellery species? 🦠 

🔍Prof. Tobias Rees is Founding Director of the Transformations of the Human program at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles; Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at Parsons/The New School in New York; and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). 🕵️‍♂️ He is the author of three books: Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (Duke), Plastic Reason (California Press), and After Ethnos (Duke). 📚 Previously he held positions at the University of Zurich/Switzerland; at McGill University in Montreal/Canada, where he served as William Dawson Chair; and at the Universities of California at San Francisco and at Berkeley. 🏛 Prof. Rees is a globally recognized expert on contemporary philosophy, art, and technology. His research focuses on how events – the sudden or slow and accumulative emergence of the unanticipated – undermine established ways of thinking + doing and transform the previously taken for granted into questions no one has answers for. 🕳 He has worked with many companies – including Adobe, google, and Facebook – and has served as advisor to many North American and European Universities on how to re-invent the human sciences and has collaborated with curators and museums around the world. 🤹‍♂️ Alone and together with colleagues, Rees has sought to build new conceptual and institutional possibilities for rendering visible the philosophical, aesthetic, and political stakes of contemporary technology and science. 💫


FRI 12.03, 15:45 - with Prof. Marcus du Sautoy

FRI 12.03 - Day 2: ‘PROCESSING’: on creativity, learning, randomness, roles of the artist, AI as collaborative tool, and value, with Prof. Marcus du Sautoy

Starts at 15:45 (CET)

Can an AI be creative? 🎨 What are relationship(s) between creativity and randomness? 🧠 How can we learn from an AI? How might Machine Learning processes impact creative practice? Do we collaborate with AI or use it as a tool? 🛠 And, does AI offer the potential to go beyond ourselves as humans? 👽

🔍 Marcus du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. 🧮 In 2008 he was appointed to the university’s prestigious professorship as the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. 👨‍🔬 In 2009 The Royal Society awarded him the Faraday Prize for excellence in communicating science to the public, and in 2010 he received an OBE from the Queen for his services to science. 🥇 He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016. He is author of numerous academic articles and books, among which the most recently published book The Creativity Code, on how AI is learning to write, paint and think. 📖 Marcus du Sautoy writes for the Times, Daily Telegraph, Independent and the Guardian and is frequently asked for comment on BBC radio and television. 📢 He collaborates regularly with different artists. He was the mathematical advisor for Complicite’s play A Disappearing Number and the National Theatre’s production of A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. 🌃 In 2013 he staged a special performance in the Linbury theatre at the Royal Opera House exploring the mathematics of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute with singers from the Opera House. 🎭 The same year he collaborated with composer and DJ James Holden on a performance entitled Consciousness at the Barbican. In 2013 his new play X&Y in which he plays X opened at the Science Museum in London and headlined the Astrolabe Theatre at Glastonbury in summer 2014. In 2014 he curated and presented three concerts with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra exploring the connections between mathematics and music. 🎼 Marcus lives and works in London.


SAT 13.03, 15:15 - with Alexandra Darby, Darja Popolitova, Dovilė Bernadišiūtė and Lee Allen Kuczewski

SAT 13.03 - Day 3: ‘OUTPUT’: on ornamutations, making processes, authorship, interactions between physical and virtual, digital curation, visual culture, and artistic research  
 with Alexandra Darby, Darja Popolitova, Dovilė Bernadišiūtė and Lee Allen Kuczewski

Starts at 15:15 (CET)

What potential, as well as threats, does AI offer for the discourse of jewellery? And, what roles can the domain of jewellery play in challenging these technologies? What can we learn about jewellery through AI? 💡 How may Machine Learning impact wearability, materiality, ownership, and creation processes? 💻 And, where do goldsmith’s traditions and craft practices fit in? 🛠 What might be the value of the generated output? Is this ‘real’ jewellery? 💍 And, who made it? What does collaborating with 100+ artists, feeding the algorithm with images of their works to create ‘a new kind of jewellery’, mean in terms of authorship, agency…?

🔍Alexandra Darby is a hyper-generalist. Trained as a jeweler, Darby’s speculative jewelry practice exists at the intersection of performance, installation, technology, and brand — critiquing notions of value and disrupting traditions through materiality and quirky installations. She is the creator of The Jewelry Phone, a speculative jewelry platform, and the founder of DARBY STUDIOS, an interdisciplinary studio in support of creative practice, founded as a launchpad for creative businesses and projects. Darby's unapologetically interdisciplinary work spans art, tech, culture, and entrepreneurship, with process as the driving force behind all her projects. Her belief in entrepreneurship for all, matched with her love of jewelry, drives her unique application of entrepreneurial thinking to independent craft businesses. Darby's work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, JCK, Creators Project, WIRED, and Fast Co. Design, and she holds a BVA in Jewelry and Object Design, and an MA in Art Curatorship. In her not-so-spare time, she works on her jewelry line, and both teaches and speaks on entrepreneurship. 

🔍Darja Popolitova lives and works in Tallinn. She is currently doing a PhD at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Darja’s practice includes: contemporary jewelry, video art, performance, and digital craft. Recently, Darja has participated in exhibitions at the Museum Arnhem (2020), Art and Design Museum in New York (2019), the Kunstnerforbundet gallery in Oslo (2018) and the international exhibition of art jewelry Schmuck in Munich (2018). Darja is represented by the following galleries: Marzee in Nijmegen, Beyond in Antwerp, and Door in Mariaheide. Her works are included in the collection of Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, Museum Arnhem and also in private collections. The work of Darja Popolitova was awarded the scholarships of the Ministry of Culture and Adamson-Eric in 2018. She also received the scholarship of Young Jewelry in 2015.

🔍 Dovilė Bernadišiūtė is a jewelry artist whose practice reflects on passages of transition intended for moving between places. Through a process of casting and imprinting interior and exterior surfaces, her work aims to create a link between the human body and space; giving objects the potential to function as mediators in everyday settings. Dovilė lives and works in Stockholm.

🔍 Lee Allen Kuczewski, also known as Lee Allen, is a New York-based vision designer and artist. Seeing is the common thread throughout his works. Collaborations with companies and artists are approached with hands of a lens maker, eyes of an anthropologist, and the execution of an architect. He is currently investigating data visualization at Parsons School of Design, and working on data experience projects in Europe and the United States. 
 In their collaborative practice, Dovilė Bernadišiūtė and Lee Allen Kuczewski explore humanity’s relationship to our senses and space, how we adorn ourselves through mapping experience, and discovery into how information design affects us. The genesis of their collaboration began with human vision as a foundational theme, and though seeing remains central to their work, both computational software and data have opened up interactivity beyond human sight into other senses, allowing for an exploration into a full, inclusive human experience. They are currently part of Current Obsession’s GEM Z program. 


SUN 14.03, 14:15 - with the participating artists and designers

SUN 14.03 - Day 4: on whatever came before, and, above all, what’s next?! Speculative reflections on the Artificial Intelligems project,  with the participating artists and designers

This event is generously supported by PXL-MAD School of Arts and Hasselt University