Presented in collaboration with MA Experience Design [link] and The Bridge [link], this talk and workshop is part of the School of Art, Design and Architecture’s exploration of Future Screen: ‘line that summarises what Future screen is all about?’

At a time when AI……

AI Forensics is a collaborative project between researchers at several international universities in Germany, the UK, and the US – and in disciplines including media theory, STS, design, computer science, and digital humanities.

During the talk, Eleanor will explain the role of worlding and listening to images (after Campt, 2017) as well as the primacy of drawing as a daily practice and method/ology in this research. Throughout the talk audiences will be asked to create and listen to their own images.

Eleanor will also be contributing to Holst Spaceship Earth: Transit of Venus [link to event page], a cosmic, multi-dimensional motion arts happening celebrating the 150th anniversary of Gustav Holst, in the Immersive Vision Theatre, Wednesday 4 December. Visit the event page [link to event page] to find out more and book tickets for this free event.

More on the AI Forensics project

The project attempts to design a new sociotechnical and political framework for the analysis and critique of visual AI systems. This includes the design and development of new tools, methods, and metaphors for the critical understanding of AI systems at three levels:

Datasets: exploring and developing tools for examining large AI image datasets (such as Imagenet or Celeb-500k) that cannot be viewed ‘manually’;

Models: uncovering biases and hidden assumptions in deep learning architectures and other AI/vision models;

Applications: understanding applied AI models in their wider social, political, and historical contexts.

The Cambridge component of the project chiefly focuses on image datasets and models, and considers the ‘visual culture’ of computer vision systems, including:

the visual culture of generative image networks like DALL·E;

the application of cultural analytics and digital art history techniques to dataset critique in computer vision;

the implicit philosophy of vision of contemporary computer vision architectures;

the methodological and epistemic implications, and implicit theoretical assumptions, of text-image transformers.

Dr Eleanor Dare

Eleanor is a Post Doctoral Research Associate and a former Methods Fellow (2023-2024) at Cambridge Digital Humanities. Before working at CDH on the AI Forensics project, Eleanor was the Senior Teaching Associate: Educational Technologies, Arts and Creativity, lecturing and supervising for MPhil and doctoral students at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Eleanor is an active developer of Games, critical AI, creative coding and VR content, with an MSc and PhD in Arts and Computational Technology specialising in AI and automated literature/artists’ books. More recent work, such as AI Forensics, the ESRC Digital Good project, Rear Windows and Monstrous have involved evolving responses to AI and human rights/ethics via public engagement workshops, Worldbuilding, performance, uncreative writing, non-human photography, drawing machines and games.

Eleanor was also Reader in Digital Media and Head of Programme for MA Digital Direction at the Royal College of Art. Eleanor has taken part in numerous exhibitions and has published dozens of papers addressing computation, AI, Education, Games and digital interaction. These include chapters in MIT’s Leonardo, ACM Interactions, Routledge, Sage and Intellect Books.

Eleanor is an AHRC Peer Review College Member (reviewer), a member of the advisory board for the Theatre in the Mill, Bradford, and formerly External Examiner for Ravensbourne University (2019-2022) and has also served as an executive editor for the Cambridge Journal of Education. Eleanor is the co-founder with Professor Dylan Yamada-Rice of the storytelling and emergent technology studio, Xordinary Stories: https://xordinarystories.com/

From January 2025 Eleanor will be a student at the Royal School of Drawing, undertaking the online drawing development year.

Eleanor’s publications can be seen here: https://rejectedshortstories.uk/2021/10/20/academic-publications and other work here: https://wordpress.com/post/rejectedshortstories.uk/263

Age Restrcition: 18 years +

Image credit: Eleanor Dare

AI Forensics: drawing, worlding and listening to images