The New Real 2023 AI Art Commission: Uncanny Machines

Open Call for Artists

The New Real announces a new AI Art commissioning opportunity (£20,000 total)

A funded opportunity for an established creative practitioner (or practitioners) to work with The New Real's cross-disciplinary team, AI tools and textual data to develop a new AI Art work for presentation with a festival/venue/presentation partner in 2023, that probes the uncanny interplay of humans and machines, and illuminates the social implications of recent developments in AI.

The commission will take place across 2023 beginning in February, presenting concepts and/or work in progress at events in March (Stage 1) and May (Stage 2), and culminating in the launch of the work produced in Edinburgh in Summer/Autumn 2023.

The New Real 2023 AI Art Commission: Uncanny Machines

Total value £20,000: 5 x £1,000 development awards, 1 x £15,000 full commission.

Expressions of Interest Deadline: 5pm, 23 January 2023

Artists' Information Session: 4pm - 5pm, 11 January 2023 (REGISTRATION DETAILS AVAILABLE SOON). Register here.

The New Real 2023 AI Art Commission is a partnership between The New Real at University of Edinburgh, Scottish AI Alliance, Alan Turing Institute and British Library.

1. About This Commission

The commission is two stage. Stage 1 will award five artists £1,000 each to develop a full project proposal and deliver a talk at a leading AI event. One of those artists will then be awarded £15,000 to develop a creative work using The New Real's experiential AI platform and a British Library/Living With Machines dataset.

Stage 1 – Expression of Interest for 5 x Development Awards

Five artists/artist groups will be awarded £1,000 each to develop a full proposal, and to deliver a talk at AIUK or Scottish AI Alliance in March 2022. The talk should address the Uncanny Machines theme, and explore both how artists can push creative boundaries with AI, and how AI can be enriched or challenged by the Arts.

Stage 2 – Full Proposals for 1 x Full Commission

One of the five artists will be awarded £15,000 (£6,000 fee / £9,000 production) to develop a new work, using The New Real's experiential AI platform, and a dataset from British Library/Living With Machines, in combination with any other tools and data, and in any media and format, for presentation in 2023 with a Festival/Presentation partner.

Application Process: Stage 1 Expression of Interest

Expressions of interest are invited by 5pm, 23rd January 2023.With a light touch application process, we are looking for a) an initial concept for a new project, and b) a proposal for a talk to be delivered in March 2022.

Information Session

Artist Information Session, 4:00-5:00pm, 11th January 2023, when we can explain more about the commission and answer your questions.

Registration Link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-new-real-art-commission-artist-information-session-tickets-484341016017

The artist/one group member needs to be UK/EU based and able to travel to participate in dissemination events – see Eligibility criteria on the New Real Commission webpage: https://www.newreal.cc/the-new-real-2023-ai-art-commission

2. Commission Theme

Uncanny Machines: AI Art and the uncanny interplay of humans and machines

As a new generation of powerful AI tools open unprecedented opportunities for artistic creation, and are entering what some call a "golden age for AI art". While wary of hype cycles, this is a moment many artists are exploring the implications for their own practice, and voicing their perspectives on the profound upheavals that these developments bring.

With new capabilities, come challenges. The outputs of the new generation of tools, such as recently released text-to-image generators, appear like magic, with little scope for human intervention or creative control. The complex algorithms are black boxed, not accessible to human understanding. There are issues around authorship, consent, fair pay, energy use, harmful bias, and misinformation. With the release of ever more powerful creative AI tools, these are increasingly mainstream opportunities and concerns.

At a time of upheaval, artists are at the forefront, helping to illuminate the ways emerging technology impacts on life at a profound level. Artists expose and explore the sublime, the indefinable, what we cant put into words. The outputs of the statistical lens of AI are often uncanny and preternatural, beyond what is normal or natural. Artists are pushing at the boundaries of human-machine creativity to generate works that combine machine learning methods with human intuition and embodied experience and discover features that are not in the data. Recently we have seen the artist community look beyond fears of so-called 'singularity' towards joyful and celebratory ways for all forms of living intelligence to flourish on a thriving planet.

In The New Real, we believe in opening up technology and data for open exploration and discovery, and in connecting science and data to applications and impacts in the real world. Our idea is to provide artists accessible tools to directly manipulate a model, in order to enable profound artistic experiments with AI. We believe this can lead to better art, and also provides a basis to probe and question urgent issues of today.

For this commission, we are looking for an artist interested to reimagine and reshape the interface and interactions between humans and machines. We are interested in transformative experiences for audiences fuelled by AI, and works that address key challenges in AI, such as authorship, harmful bias or misinformation.

Send us an early stage project concept, and your ideas for a talk, to address the Uncanny Machines theme, and explore both how artists can push creative boundaries with AI, and how AI can be enriched or challenged by the Arts. You will be able to use our machine learning platform, it’s Word2vec feature, and custom tools to probe, explore and generate textual data relating to your theme. This is specifically an opportunity for you to explore how you can develop profound new works when you have more granular control over an AI tool and can use it to probe and fine tune a model. We invite you to experiment with our platform and data to investigate the entanglements of people, data, machines and environments and to develop multi-sensory exploration of possible futures.

The New Real’s Research

The New Real is a unique academic research group – as we both commission and produce significant artworks, and develop new technology, as a part of our AI, creativity and futures research. We ask how can AI augment and be enriched by the arts and how far can data science and the arts help to answer each other’s questions.

We work with both users and developers of tools to support significant artistic works and to inspire new technology concepts. We believe The New Real is ideally placed to enable artists to develop new dimensions to their practice working with Art and AI.

The New Real conducts research on the following themes:

• Creative AI for good – Reimagining and reshaping the interface and interactions between humans and machines.

• Co-creation and agency in creative AI – Increasing accessibility and interpretability for artists.

• Transformative intelligent experiences – Infuse experiences with intelligence, and intelligence with serendipity.

• Critical and planetary literacies – Finding joyful and celebratory ways to enable all forms of living intelligence to flourish on a thriving planet.

At the centre of these themes and developed by The New Real, is the concept Experiential AI. Experiential AI refers both to cultural experiences fuelled by AI, and to AI that can itself be directly experienced to make it more legible and explicable. It is advanced as a novel paradigm for fair and inclusive creative AI, that generates transformative experiences for audiences, and that exposes and makes explicit different aspects of the life cycle of AI systems.

For this commission we are asking that the artist/group focus respond to the commission theme and address one or more of the following topics of interest to The New Real relating to the social aspects of recent developments in AI:

• Agency

• Authorship

• Bias

• Collaboration

• Confusion of humans and machines

• Consent

• Creativity

• Energy use

• Fairness

• Inclusion

• Intelligence

• Intuition

• Labour

• Legibility and explainability

• Liveness

• Misinformation

• Quantification

• Serendipity

• Sustainability

We are looking to support artists/groups that have a genuine interest in one or more of these topics and are be open to collaboration and co-creation with the research team as part of the commission journey.

3. Resources – Technology, Data, Fee, Production budget

The New Real’s platform – How it works and what you can do with our platform

We will support you to experiment with our Experiential AI platform combining an AI algorithm and a number of easy-to-use tools. The platform is designed to give you increased access and control over an AI model and to creatively explore a textual dataset. This can allow you to conduct profound experiments with more control than with many of the current generation of AI tools.

We are a University research group, we do not have huge resources, and consequently our platform does have some limitations. We are looking for an artist interested to collaborate with us in experimenting in this vision of more accessible and legible technologies, to see the constraints as a creative challenge.

Using our platform, you can iteratively curate data by training an AI model and creatively exploring the results: You define the dimensions you want the algorithm to explore, and use simple tools to probe the latent space. As you build familiarity with the outputs of the model, you can retrain the model by changing the textual data, and re-define the dimensions, to generate new results. We have developed bespoke tools such as a 'Slider" as an accessible interface to explore the latent space, without the need to run your own python code.

In this commission, we focus on textual data, and provide access to a new natural language processing (NLP) feature on our platform built around a Word2vec algorithm. This type of AI works by analysing a corpus of texts such as books or news articles (some suggestions for data to use are below, but we support any training data in cleaned .txt format). The algorithm is then inferring the probabilistic structure of word usage, effectively building a multi-dimensional map of semantic space. By exploring this map, you can discover patterns reflecting predominant language use that might be otherwise difficult to spot.

You may choose to base a work directly on this textual output, or to use the words/concepts you generate as inputs for the creation of interactions, images, sound or other media. You are welcome to combine with other tools and other data to create a work using any media and in any format you like.

We invite you to use the platform to probe the uncanny interplay of humans and machines and explore the way the AI makes sense of the world.

Data – Inspirational textual datasets from British Library and Living With Machines

This Commission is a collaboration between the New Real and the Living with Machines project, a ground-breaking partnership between The Alan Turing Institute, the British Library, and the Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Exeter, and London (QMUL, King’s College). It brings together historians, data scientists, geographers, computational linguists, and curators to examine the human impact of the industrial revolution.

Working with colleagues at British Library and the Living With Machines project, we will provide access to inspirational datasets including a digitised collection of historic newspapers, books and other archival material. As a starting point, our idea is that 'What Is A Machine?' data (Living Machines atypical animacy dataset) is an interesting lens to probe the uncanny interplay of humans and machines, and explore the social implications of recent developments in AI.

Through this partnership the commissioned artist will have access to the following datasets for this project:

British Library datasets, available from: https://data.bl.uk/bl_labs_datasets/#3 Any interesting exploration of our themes with this data would be welcome.

4.2-billion-word corpus of 19th-century British newspapers accessible through Living with Machines' ‘alto2txt’ tool (https://github.com/Living-with-machines/alto2txt see description and a use case here: Diachronic word embeddings from 19th-century British newspapers.)

Digitised printed books from British Library including 60,000 volumes (around 25 million pages) of out of copyright 18th and 19th century texts: https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/digitised-printed-books (British Library Labs have collected some of examples of use over time at https://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs)

In addition, you will also have access to data previously curated by The New Real, for example a geographically-coded selected subset of the Copernicus' Climate Data Store (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/), focusing on future predictions for average temperature, precipitation and wind speed under three different climate change models (green action, status quo, rampant emissions). These numerical data can be used to probe the dimensions of the semantic latent space or incorporated into the work in other ways.

Fee & Production budget

Stage 1 – 5 x £1,000 Development Awards
Stage 2 – £15,000 Full Commission is available through to delivery of an artwork/experience with festival/venue/presentation partner (final presentation partner tbd). This includes a fee of £6,000 and includes all production costs.

The New Real will provide access to a high competency science and technical team who will support access to the New Real tools and datasets, including the Word2vec machine learning algorithm and pipeline of the New Real Observatory Platform

Data processing costs relating to the commissioned work need to be covered by the commissioned artist’ production budget. The New Real team can help with contacts through their networks.

For more information about the Commission and how to apply, please visit the New Real Commission webpage: https://www.newreal.cc/the-new-real-2023-ai-art-commission

4. Commission Partners

About The New Real

Established in 2019, The New Real is a unique hub for AI, creativity and futures research. It is a partnership between the University of Edinburgh, Alan Turing Institute, and Edinburgh’s Festivals. Its research explores how AI impacts on life at a profound level, often interacting with us in fascinating and unanticipated ways, and illuminates how emerging technology can become a creative, playful and deeply impactful part of everyday living.

The New Real is working with the AI community to develop creative tools that are accessible and legible, and with artists on profound artistic experiments with AI that can contribute to more fair and inclusive technologies. We call this Experiential AI, which means both cultural experiences generated using AI, and AI that can be experienced, understood, and intervened in, by a human. We invite you to join us on this journey.

The New Real team believes that art and creativity can help to radically change how we think about AI design, moving beyond the current paradigm of learning patterns from large amounts of data, to embrace human traits such as bias, disagreement, and uncertainty as a signal with creative potential rather than noise that needs to be removed. We devise imaginative ways to experiment with new experiences, practices, infrastructures and business models, and to empower people be agents of positive change.

Our ambition is to become the place for significant artists to come to, to advance their careers through artistic development on AI.

The Scottish AI Alliance

Delivering Scotland’s AI Strategy Scotland’s AI Strategy. It was launched in March 2021 with a vision for Scotland to become a leader in the development and use of trustworthy, ethical and inclusive AI. The Scottish AI Alliance is the body tasked with delivering this vision and the actions outlined in the strategy. It is a partnership between The Data Lab and the Scottish Government.

The Alan Turing Institute

The Alan Turing Institute is the national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, with headquarters at the British Library. In 2017, as a result of a government recommendation, they added artificial intelligence to their remit. The Institute is named in honour of Alan Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), whose pioneering work in theoretical and applied mathematics, engineering and computing are considered to be the key disciplines comprising the fields of data science and artificial intelligence.

Edinburgh Futures Institute

At the Edinburgh Futures Institute we challenge, create, and make change happen. We are focussed on tackling today’s increasingly complex issues and shaping a better tomorrow through education and research with a difference. We bring people and disciplines together to spark the unexpected. We are creating a curious, open-minded, thought-laboratory in order to make better futures possible.

Edinburgh College of Art

Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), is a vibrant and internationally-engaged interdisciplinary hub for creative innovation embedded within the world-leading University of Edinburgh. Our researchers pioneer disciplinary advancement, push boundaries of creative practice, and lead innovative modes of engagement and impact beyond the academy. Engaging at the global level, our researchers respond to contemporary challenges such as those raised by data, social inequalities, cultural heritage and climate change and our critical articulation of emerging issues such as the impact of Artificial Intelligence.