All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony
like pure water touching clear sky.

Richard Brautigan

As our world becomes ever more uncertain the role of how art and design can actively participate and respond within this environment is of consequence. Dominant discursive arguments of today fall back on historical crutches and habit. In contrast to this we live in a technological sphere that is radically altering our communication, experience and understanding of the world. If the early experiments in design research labs such as the Architecture Machine Group at MIT served as precursor to the communication revolution that we have witnessed. Today algorithms, artificial intelligence, bio hacking, robotics, augmented reality, and machine learning are the dominant frontiers for interrogation. If one considers the current situation much of what these systems are being designed for reinforce and bias a world as is rather than the possibilities of enabling a more collective and shared tomorrow.

The symposium will engage a series of discussions about things, agency, and us. The event aims to speak to the forces that shape the way we see and understand through the eyes of a machinic world. Through human and non-human entanglements, the world today is plural and encoded as information; issues of codification, control, bias, learning, and computational creativity will be examined and discussed as open territories to actively identify and participate in the pressing complexities of this world. The symposium is organised and will be moderated by the Director of the AADRL Theodore Spyropoulos.

Session One, 2-4pm GMT

Minimaforms (Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos)
Ariane Koek
Sougwen Chung

Session Two, 5-7pm GMT

Kenric Allado-McDowell
Libby Heaney
Lucy Mcrae

Minimaforms is a laboratory at the crossroads of art, design, science and technology that fosters frameworks that are shared and collective. Foregrounding human and emotive experiences that construct the interfaces of our interaction. Minimaforms was founded by brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos to explore design as a medium that enables curiosity, evolves and allows for complex interactions to arise through human and nonhuman agency. The spectrum of work has ranged from the design of immersive ephemeral environments, buildings, emotive AI robotics to 3d printed sculptures printed in sand. Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Detroit Institute of Arts, Barbican Centre, ICA (London), FRAC Centre, MOCA Taipei, Onassis Cultural Centre, Leonardo Da Vinci Science and Technology Museum, Guangdong Science Centre, Tekniska Museet, Beijing Biennale and Hong Kong Biennale.
https://minimaforms.com

Ariane Koek is an independent arts/science/technology consultant, director, producer and writer specialising in transdisciplinary working and residency programmes. From December 2019, Ariane has been an Associate and Advisor to The Exploratorium - the museum of science, art and human perception, San Francisco,USA and Creative Partner of the new physics/arts residency programme at Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. She is also on the Global Advisory Board of Edgelands Institute, a new pop-up initiative incubated at Harvard University and in Geneva, Switzerland, looking at cities, technology and the urban contract, which launches this Spring. As a curator, her latest exhibitions include Entangle: Physics and the Artistic Imagination Bildmuseet, Sweden (2019), The Matter of Painting Musée Marmottan Monet (2019) Backlight: Related Realities, Galerie Himmelblau, Finland (2020) and Real Feelings: Emotion and Technology at HeK, Basel (2020) and MU Eindhoven May 28th 2021.
Ariane is a founding Advisory Board member and Expert Arts Advisor to the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) for environmental sciences research and policy which has 7 laboratories across Europe, and is on the Advisory Board of Science Gallery Venice. She created and curates their 3 year environmental arts/science residency programme, Earth Water Sky, funded by Fondation Didier et Martine Primat. She is internationally known for initiating, designing and directing the acclaimed Arts at CERN program 2009-2015, including the Collide, Accelerate and Guest Artist programmes.
http://www.arianekoek.com

Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and (re)searcher based in New York. Chung's work explores the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems. Chung is a former research fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration. In 2019, she was selected as the Woman of the Year in Monaco for achievement in the Arts & Sciences. She is a featured TED Speaker, discussing her process in post-human collaboration and her project using AI and robots was featured on the cover of Art in America. In 2018 she was an inaugural E.A.T. Artist in Resident in partnership with New Museum and Bell Labs, and was awarded a commission for her project Omnia per Omnia. In 2016, Chung received Japan Media Art’s Excellence Award in for her project, Drawing Operations.
https://sougwen.com

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. He is the author, with GPT-3, of the book Pharmako-AI, and co-editor, with Ben Vickers, of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. He records and releases music under the name Qenric. Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.
https://kalladomcdowell.com

Libby Heaney is a British artist and lecturer at the Royal College of Art. She works on the impact of future technologies and is a resident of Somerset House Studios. Her work takes quantum physics as a starting point, (re)examining systems through a quantum computational lens in interactive installations and participatory events. She has a degree in physics from Imperial College London, a PhD in Quantum Information Science from the University of Leeds and held post-doc positions at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. She has exhibited with the Science Gallery, Dublin; Tate Modern; Blitz Gallery, Valletta; Arebyte Gallery and also Point B, New York, and is currently working on a research project with the V&A Museum. She is a research tutor at the Royal College of Art where she runs the Systems Research Group and has published around 20 internationally peer reviewed research papers in physics and art.
http://libbyheaney.co.uk

Lucy McRae is a science fiction artist and body architect that has exhibited at major museums, film festivals, institutes such as MIT, Ars Electronica and NASA and science forums worldwide. Her artworks have been shown at Science Museum London, Centre Pompidou, and the Venice Biennale. She is a visiting professor at SCI-Arc, and is recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. McRae encourages scientific conversation and has spoken at TED, Royal Albert Hall, Cannes Lion and Tribeca Film Festival. She is regarded as a pioneer who blurs the boundaries across art, architecture, design and technology, with a healthy disregard for labels that limit interdisciplinary practice. McRae’s practice centers on the imagining of alternative future possibilities for the human body and how it could evolve. She considers how human biology might be augmented by a mixture of physical design, modification of genes and emotions—technology transforming the body and ethics.
https://www.lucymcrae.net

Theodore Spyropoulos is an artist, architect and educator. He is the Director of the Architectural Association’s Design Research Lab (AADRL) in London and resident artist at Somerset House. Theodore has previously chaired the AA Graduate School, was Professor of Architecture at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt and has been a visiting Research Fellow at M.I.T.’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He co-founded the experimental art, architecture and design practice Minimaforms. Theodore has previously worked for the offices of Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid. In 2013 the Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture awarded him the ACADIA award of excellence for his educational work directing the AADRL. He has been published internationally including authoring Adaptive Ecologies: Correlated Systems of Living (2013), Enabling (2010) and forthcoming Behaviours (2021). He received his PhD from UCL where his research was focused on the subjects of behaviour, participatory frameworks, human and non-human intelligence and the role of second order cybernetics within adaptive design systems.
https://drl.aaschool.ac.uk

Image caption: Lucy McRae, Solitary Survival Raft