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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-08
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrPegku0znk
I'm not if and I use technology is an artistic medium floor how it is that we think about now in the future I believe the us practice and technology herb powerful combination because they can help us to explore critical issues like artificial intelligence global warming the genetics of violence today I want to share with you some of my projects and I want to share some of
the projects of the community it's been emerging in New York artists and technologies to dealing with these types of issues to get started when I talk about my out practice to do that I'm gonna tell you about my health in two thousand and fourteen I was diagnosed with type one diabetes and that means that I had to stop thinking very carefully about my blood glucose levels
any testing insulin very frequently I started wearing a body sensor which broke because my blood glucose values over a radio signal to my fun and I stitched together with some open source tools could extrait and not scout and I was able to get a real time buddy feed did this O. installation which is a visualization which represents what those numbers mean to me numbers like ninety
one represent a good and a healthy state very low volleys like fifty three actually dangerous and in this situation I can feel heart beat sweating shaking his own higher numbers because the constriction in the flow of the animation now higher values don't cause me any immediate symptoms but looks of high numbers of a time with the crew and they cause a variety of body wide complications
including heart attack stroke blindness amputation the list is long and the list is very gruesome so the effects on me a psychological I spend a lot of energy and time trying to keep the numbers in a healthy range I know that with this very personal condition that I live with I have to acknowledge it in order to deal with it in order to survive but then
I realized all of us collectively have a very similar condition and it's just as bad it is urgent and is just as life threatening and that's climate change I created this installations hopes think about how global reaction to climate change and to compare it to a personal reactions women diagnosed with chronic illnesses ourselves this something about how big and how will encompassing climate changes where we
say yes it's urgent yes it's sexist and but then we allowed to slip down a priority list I am people with diabetes we respond differently we want to learn about it who want to act on it and we wanna put it very high on the list the American diabetes association publishes this graphic on the website it's designed to help newly diagnosed people think about their options
going forward I chose the path of two fictional characters nana Mary throughout their lives and the colored dots represent a sense of fear and shock and of anger and stress where is the what does represent some intro you see how these things change over time for the two characters the key insight is if like marry you acknowledge the condition early front load your engagement with the
treatment for the medicine to start to show in this good news you can live a long and healthy life it's actually a highly positive message because it shows that you can take looming existential threats that are actually very scary and you can take control of them and you can turn them into dust I would use imagine for a moment that you have been diagnosed with diabetes
and you've been handed this chart how long would you wait to start treatment one year two years you begin immediately how many hours of your day would you spend on managing the condition how much money would you spend we would sit on your priority list so here's the thing take global climate change that situation overlays exactly on to this chart and we as a species already
Hoff way down on Anna's trajectory there is still time we could make a positive leap over to Mary's judiciary but we need a big push from all of us to make something like that happened and we've made it very very quickly so you can see what I'm doing here is I'm using our and technology to well what the future holds and to look at how we
think about the future I first moved to New York in two thousand twelve and one of the first works I made was an audio visual installation good long so in this work I'm using projection to look up perception of nature and in this case of rocks I'm asking can we modify a fundamental conceptions of these objects that we would normally consider to be lifeless and bring
a sense of agency in movement clip of the press is behind that shows that on during light directly onto the rocks and for me this is another example of me using on technology to think about our perceptions of the world in this next projects I'm exploring depth video and this is an incredible technology because you can shoot scenes from one position and then you can re
render the scene from any other position including from behind a wall show up in the morning tunnels of the London Underground and here we can see that I'm using our and technology to explore how we conceive of the bill urban environment of mass cities to think about this paradox of how being surrounded by millions of people can actually still be very isolating it was while I
was working on that project that I met the artist and curator Ellen Pullman and she was studying the same depth technology and we started running these workshops and events together to support the community that bill around it Ellen then came and helped us out to build a vibrant community around the hardware hack club which is a weekly meets up run out of the New York office
of the global technology consultancy cool but works the lab provides community access to hardware including virtual reality body senses electronics equipment and so on and this is becoming hub in New York for creative collaboration following on from that we founded ought to hack in this was Ellen's I did have a program where we curate teams based on an open call for applications and we match people
together with mixed this in the we incubate our lead explorations into various emerging technologies again this is run out of school works New York and it's done in collaboration with a number of other institutions like New York University the metropolitan museum's media lab Microsoft and others our alumni from this program is going to show work that Mumma at the tribeca Film Festival and and I'm not
kidding here at the North Pole Ellen has made her own arts practice she's looked in detail of drinking Peter interface which is headsets that can read your brain state Ellen went on to develop the world's first brain opera at a three hundred sixty degree theater in Hong Kong in the opera a forma wears a brincadeira set it reads her emotional state those emotions drive the colors
and the sounds and videos the audience experience Noah is the name of a female British secret agent who was dropped behind enemy lines during World War two and so she was captured imprisoned and executed she was very successful at relaying messages back to Britain but telling a story through the lens of World War two Ellen's asking us to think about the possibilities when this type of
technology gets into the hands of authoritarian regimes she's asking is there a place in human consciousness the violence cannot go so this is another example of pots and technology questioning and critiquing trajectory that we're on and you can see this with my practice with Ellen's practice and with the community programs ought to hack into the hot club then Elena got together and we decided to take
it one step further we create a funded arts residency based out of what works support the artist who working with emerging technologies and looking at the implications of those technologies for society you see I and many technologists but works are thinking very deeply about these types of issues and about the future of technology and society and with the residency we could not go much deeper and
we have collaborations between artists and the designers and developers at that works the first residents who work with with a subtle foundation and this is no Harbison and moon rebus their work is about transhumanism and this is the augmentation of human capabilities with emerging technologies Neil is nine for surgical implant in his head innocent antenna which allows him to hear colors as sound here's a camera
at the front of the antenna and the color frequencies from the camera the translated into audio frequencies which you can hear men rebus has an employment in her arm and this allows it to feel whenever the seismic activity anywhere in the world she's a dancer and choreographer and she uses that sensation in their performances one of the key insights of the subtle foundation is the permanent
implants or permanently worn wearables in effect become new human senses over time the psychology of the wearer adapts to the incoming data stream which is always on and this becomes another sense just like sight and sound and smell and so on I am the engineers from this community and the thought works employees collaborated with the sy books on the development of two new senses Withnail we
create a time since which allows him to perceive the twenty four hour clock around the circumference of his head what he wants to do is to develop a psychological awareness of distance and make it part of his internal experience and then to adapt and to move his sensation of time so that it goes faster and it go slower man has created a new version of a
seismic since and this one allows it to GA locate tremors so that she can sense where they are in the world and this is something that's going to give her a chance to become much more in sync with the movements of the planet the future is suggested by this work are startling with an internet enabled sends like men so it makes sense any data feed from
the internet competently become you internalized bodily sensation what the implications of that as our children grow up in a world with these types of augmentations are available to those that can afford it and providing advantages to those that can afford it we're gonna be the social pressures well the work precious form to Woodside Buddhism again this is an example of us practice provokes thought and dialogue
about an emerging future my next US president was had to do we had booked and she's known for collecting discarded gum cigarette butts and extracting DNA from them she takes into gene sequencing lab and she three D. prince faces based on the traits from that day and I can see some examples a in a gallery setting up during the residency heather collaborated with the vending costs
raid whistleblower Chelsea manning and with the full works designer surely cananga she produced this comic book which helps bring this very important conversation towards a general audience what's fascinating here is that shortly after I had the study printing these faces an industry most around it and vendors start offering this is the service you give me some DNA and I'll give you a face do you know
analysis is getting cheaper all the time and everywhere we go we leave a trail of DNA so this raises interesting questions about genetic privacy the genetics of violence and also about bias the artificial intelligence systems used to generate these faces trained on datasets related to human conventions about race gender and identity not scientific models then this is how artificial intelligence works it learns about how humans
do things and then it mimics that that's been alluded to in the second pain here and artificial insolence like this is being rolled out across society right now and it's making consequential decisions for people's lives including things like loan applications criminal sentencing this significant evidence that these systems are often learning and automating human by sees an algorithmic form that scale not something that the designers in
the use of the systems don't actually intend but it is happening in practice and that's why with the US presidency we have an open call out right now for an artist the wants to go deeper into the biases of artificial intelligence during the full twenty seventy once again with head this work and with the residency generally we see our practice technology tools hoping to critique an
emerging future that's not as myself looking at personal health and a climate change and as a director of these programs I know that looking into the future can be scary they're all these unknowns and they're all these risks but this is somewhere where are consistent in it can help us in an entirely unique way whether it's climate change Assad will give them by yesterday I would
DNA it will bring surveillance artists hoping his good deed with these issues see them in a new light and to understand these amazing new ideas in a tangible way right in front of us this helps us to see and discuss the risks and the opportunities and to put them into context and that enables us to take control of very difficult issues so this is why I
