slow immediate is the winner of a residency in the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab competition initiated by Ars Electronica. The duo, Xin Liu (CN/US) and Gershon Dublon (US), was nominated for their project “The wandering mind,” now being realized through residencies at the Muntref Centro de Arte y Ciencia, the Laboratorio de Neurociencia de la Universidad Torquato Ditella in Buenos Aires, and the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz. The result will then be presented at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz in September 2020 and at the Muntref Centro de Arte y Ciencia in Buenos Aires.
The wandering mind is a meditative, multisensory experience enabled by attention-based and context-aware AI system to unfold our Earth. Through this self-guided experience, the audience’s senses and consciousness roam around the world, becoming part of everything.
“You are the universe experiencing itself”, the quote from Allan Watts, illustrates a harmony of the individuals and the world around us. However, in the modern anthropocene, we are finding it more challenging to connect with the land, ourselves and each other. Technology is often blamed for this alienation. But our planet is sensed and measured at a massive scale, yielding a dataset of unprecedented richness and valuable opportunities to produce knowledge. What if we could take a positive and creative spin on this dilemma, empowering ourselves to feel the pulse of the Earth?
In The wandering mind, we envision planetary scale sensing and AI becoming our peripheral nervous system, an externalized sensory processor for a world of sensor data beyond our direct perceptual reach. We will leverage open-source global data streaming services such as Radio Aporee as the foundation of this world and will combine the audience’s inferred attention and listening patterns with output from an AI engine to navigate through it.
Read more about the project on the Ars Electronica Blog…
Xin Liu (CN) (b. 1991, Xinjiang/China) is an artist and engineer whose practice includes performances, art objects, scientific experiments and academic works. She considers science as a language and technology a means to explore emotions, beliefs, and subjective experiences. Liu is arts curator of the Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. She has won numerous residencies and awards and has presented at the Sundance Film Festival, the Walker Art Center, the OCAT Shanghai, and the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz.
Gershon Dublon (US) (b. 1986, New York) is a researcher, artist, and engineer creating environments, installations, systems, and studies for aesthetic and transformative sensory experience. His work has been exhibited at the Boston MFA and shown at Montreal’s RIDM and at Ars Electronica. His writing appears in journals such as Presence and Scientific American.