Creative Feedback: The Feats and Failures of Technology

To what extent can human creators exercise control on the technological tools they are using? And how does the control that technology exerts on them influence the creative process?

This event will feature two audiovisual performances – Figure Infinity by Louis McHugh and Jung In Jung and Traumgraz by Jung In Jung and Lynda Clark – which reflect on issues around the platformisation of labour, communication dynamics between humans and Artificial Intelligence, disinformation, and creative agency. The performances will be followed by a panel discussion where artists, technologists, and researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Abertay University will engage in conversations on the interplay between technology, creativity, and human agency. The aim of the event is to foreground the opportunities and limitations of the feedback between humans and machines and to suggest creative directions to promote human expression in the digital age.

The event will also mark the launch of the new research cluster “Creativity, AI, and the Human”, led by Caterina Moruzzi.

The panel will be followed by a reception in the Inspace Gallery.

Running order:

17:00 – Doors open

17:30 – Traumgraz

17:50 – Welcome + break

18:10 – Figure Infinity

18:30 – Panel

19:00 – Reception

20:00 – End

Performers and Speakers:

Louis McHugh, is a sound and new media artist and engineer currently based in Glasgow. Often generating bespoke software and hardware for his projects, he works with sound, video and lighting to create site-specific installations, fixed-media work, theatrical design and live improvisational performances. He is currently exploring ideas to do with emergent systems, taking inspiration from biological structures, social media interactions and artificial intelligence. He currently works as Audio Studio Manager at the Edinburgh College of Art and is a resident DJ with Radio Buena Vida, Glasgow where he host's a monthly experimental music show; The Rhizome.

Jung In Jung, is a Lecturer in Creative Computing at the School of Design and Informatics, Abertay University. She is a sound artist and researcher. She has produced interactive sound and dance collaborations with contemporary dancers and presented them at various international festivals and conferences. She explores various ways to create interactive forms of performance using game technologies and AI/ML tools. In the last recent years, she has investigated anonymous play in a VR platform using hand gestures and sound as a method to deviate from biases for her post-doc research at InGAME.

Alex McCabe, is a Glasgow-based performer, performance maker and facilitator in dance and music. With this dual specialisation he has worked extensively and internationally in choreography for opera (Wexford Festival Opera; Teatro Reggio; Scottish Opera) and experimental interdisciplinary projects (British ParaOrchestra, Marc Brew; Fattoria Vittadini). Alex works with various organisations in Scotland towards broadening access to experiences and careers in dance and music, most significantly through his project SIIATE, supported by the Scotland-Europe Fund. Trained in dance and choreographic practice through Dance Base Edinburgh’s DEBS, Alex also holds an MA, PhD and Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Glasgow.

Lynda Clark, is Lecturer in Creative Writing (Interdisciplinary Futures) and Programme Director of the Narrative Futures MSc at the University of Edinburgh. She is a novelist, short story writer and creator of interactive narratives. Lynda is primarily interested in how new technologies shape us and the world around us. This manifests in her prose, interactive stories and video game work. She also has a keen interest in depicting unusual and disordered voices in creative forms.

Jadgeep Ahluwalia, is a Research Fellow at Abertay University, specialising in the fields of image super-resolution, image generation, and the optimization of deep learning algorithms. His research draws inspiration from the human visual system, guiding the adaptation of artificial intelligence models to create super-resolution images with remarkable perceptual accuracy. He also has experience in the research & development of machine learning algorithms for research startups and charity organisations particularly in the fields of material sciences, health and social care and bioinformatics.

Martin Zeilinger is Senior Lecturer in Computational Arts and Technology at Abertay University. His work as a researcher and curator focuses on artistic and activist experimentation with emerging technologies, and on exploring the cultural and societal impacts of such technologies. He has published widely on AI in digital culture, and is the author of the monograph Tactical Entanglements: AI Art, Creative Agency, and the Limits of Intellectual Property (2021).

Panel chair: Caterina Moruzzi, is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the Institute for Design Informatics, School of Design at the University of Edinburgh. Her research lies at the intersection between the philosophy of art, history and philosophy of human and artificial creativity, and the philosophy of AI. In her ongoing projects, she collaborates with researchers, artists, and technology companies to investigate modes of shared agency and creativity between humans, data, and technology. She is lead of the new research cluster “Creativity, AI, and the Human” at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh.

Performances:

Traumgraz (audiovisual performance with interactive story), by Jung In Jung and Lynda Clark

The work is inspired by the anthropomorphism term ‘hallucination’ used for artificial intelligence’s confident response but unjustified false information. An interactive story is written between a large language model and Lynda Clark based on pictures sent from Graz by Jung In Jung during her Styrian Artist in Residency (St.A.i.R) and is set in a building with escalating levels of weirdness. Jung performs live with the randomly generated story by choosing paths along with sound materials she generated by experimenting with various AI models.

Figure Infinity (audio-visual performance), by Louis McHugh and Jung In Jung

Figure Infinity is an audio-visual performance project that connects human performers in a self-reflexive network of control and communication with Artificial Intelligence. It responds to recent narratives surrounding “AI”, which largely obscure the collective human endeavour that produced the data these systems are built on, by inviting audiences to partake in the development of a real-time performance data set. Encountered uncannily through absurdity and play, audiences can experience some of the creative possibilities and limitations of AI systems.

Please note limited seats are available at Inspace, so please book tickets in advance.

This event is supported by Creative Informatics and the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

*Important Notice* This event will be photographed and recorded and the data published online and used for research, promotional and reporting purposes by the Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh. For further information please contact the organisers.

Picture Credit: Still from Figure Infinity performance, xCoAx 2023, photo by Caterina Moruzzi