The team at UKAI is back after a much-needed break following the successful first iteration of our Carnival of Algorithmic Culture. Over 450 folks came through over the two days and hopefully the images above give a sense of what it was like.
We came into it excited for it to be other and convinced we'd never do it again.
Saturday afternoon, or thereabouts, we started wondering out loud if another go might make sense.
By the early hours of Sunday morning we were excitedly discussing a second year.
The balance of the summer and into the fall remains quite busy for us at UKAI. We'll have a big announcement next week about moving into a space in Toronto that will allow us to host more frequent (and more controllable) events in our own home.
August 3 and 10 we'll be delivering workshops with our good friends at Inter/Access on how we might use generative language in interesting ways.
On August 21, we'll be in Edinburgh, Scotland to share AI Ritual with our partners and friends at STO Union as part of Spotlight Canada: The Pitch Session 2023.
This in-person event will feature five-minute pitches by the selected projects, as well as a Q&A with the artists and a moderator, for an audience of international producers, artistic directors, festival curators, presenters, and programmers from around the globe.
AI Ritual is a multi-lingual Live Art project focused on the hopes and fears of audience members, gathered in real time through an act of intimate confession. Hopes and fears are a binary that drive much of human behavior. When applied to artificial intelligence, the ‘machine’ begins to appear a bit more human. Just like a great actor, the AI’s performance is a moving tribute to what drives human beings to do what we do.
On August 23, we'll be taking part in MUTEK's Forum and offering a workshop on the design of multi-modal AI agents.
The Fall will see us in residence at Watershed in Bristol (UK) for two weeks developing cultural infrastructure for a world profoundly changed by climate and political volatility, engaging with the book publishing and printing industry in Milan (IT) as part of our Poetics of Synthetic Language residency, and developing approaches for artists working with artificial intelligence to sketch out their work in ways consistent with the experiences these projects entail (in both Berlin (DE) and London (UK).
We'll have plenty of things happening at home in Toronto as well. To stay up to date with workshops, events, game nights (yes, game nights) and other good times, follow our Instagram account or join our Discord community of weird and brilliant creators.