IKLECTIK presents,
Artificial Intelligence and Crypto for Artists Workshop by Gene Kogan
With Abraham showcase and live performances by Louis McCallum and digital selves.
Saturday 4 September 2021 | 2pm to 11pm (2pm – 6pm Workshop part 1 | 8pm – 10pm screening + Live performances)
Sunday 5 September 2021 | 4pm to 10pm (4pm – 8pm Workshop part 2 + showcase | 8:30pm dj set)
The incredible possibilities of new technologies challenge our understandings of what creative practice can be. Gene Kogan’s 2-day workshop will introduce you to generative art, and teach you to use AI and blockchain in your own artistic practice.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
- Overview of past research and current applications of Artificial Intelligence arts
- Tutorial on text-to-image generative models [based on OpenAI’s CLIP + VQGAN]
- A discussion about how AI arts fits into the broader crypto-art / NFT ecosystem; what AI arts has to offer, and how it differs in that respect to other kinds of generative art.
- Introduction to Abraham project with an interactive demo
This workshop is open to practitioners of all backgrounds and levels of experience.
Both workshop days will be followed by concerts and showcases.
GENE KOGAN
Gene Kogan is an artist and a programmer who is interested in generative systems, computer science, and software for creativity and self-expression. He is a collaborator within numerous open-source software projects, and gives workshops and lectures on topics at the intersection of code and art. For more information about his projects take a look at his website: https://genekogan.com/.
SCHEDULE
DAY 1
2pm – 6pm Gene Kogan Workshop Part 1 [3 hours with 1 hour break]
8pm (7:30pm doors) ecolagbohrsac2021 – THE PRIMER [screening]
8:30pm Louis McCallum – EverySongIOwn [Live performance]
9:10pm digital selves [Live performance]
DAY 2
4pm – 6pm Gene Kogan Workshop Part 2 [2 hours]
6:30pm Abraham Showcase
8:30pm IKLECTIK DJ Set
Tickets:
BUY TICKETS
Student Full-pass ticket [2-day workshop + live performances] £45
Student 2 day workshop only [including the Abraham Showcase + IKLECTIK DJ Set] £40
Full-pass ticket [2-day workshop + live performances] £60
2 day workshop only [including the Abraham Showcase + IKLECTIK DJ Set] £55
Live performances only [Saturday] £10 Advance / OTD £13
Through the explanation/lecture about the Abraham project [https://abraham.ai/], the two day event will host Gene Kogan with a 5-hour practical tutorial and workshop on how to generate images using text and how artificial intelligence and blockchain can be brought together to create an ‘artist in the cloud’.
The event will start on Saturday with a 3 hour workshop on the idea of an autonomous artificial artist as a sovereign creative spirit who generates original art. This idea builds on top of promising techniques from machine learning, cryptoeconomics, and computer art and could be regarded as a logical progression from decades of research by artists, scientists, and philosophers, contemplating the nature of creativity and consciousness, and their relationship to technology.
Saturday will conclude with a screening of ecolagbohrsac2021’s work-in-progress, THE PRIMER, and live performances by Louis McCallum and digital selves.
Building up to the research and writings for the upcoming Beyond Quantum Music festival performance, ecolagbohrsac2021’s THE PRIMER, is a study and practice of generating melodies as an act of conjuration/divination and role of the agent/artist during various generative and stochastic/machine learning processes. Particularly seeking correlations between medieval occult practices and software development by approaching it from various angles, re-thinking these tools as spirits one can bind and command instead of ‘collaborating’ with.
Live coder & techno-feminist digital selves will use the programming mini-language TidalCycles to perform algorithmic improvisations, full of crunchy sounds and melodic textures. Her recent works include collaborations with the BBC’s research and development department, hosting feminist hackathons with Leeds International Festival, running live coding workshops with the V&A and Music Hackspace, and featuring in the “Artist DIY” documentary series in FACT magazine.
Louis, utilising a hard drive containing his entire teenage music collection, uses neural networks to perform live as an act of making sense of this plethora of audio files.
The second day will continue with the second part of the workshop which will be followed by a “performance” and group exercise involving the demo from the previous day’s bullet points in which the participants will use fake crypto tokens to curate the best results with Abraham and interact with the autonomous artificial artist.
Shedding light to multiple aspects of crypto in artistic practices such as the environmental impacts, the event should provide a lot of insights about how using tokens groups of people can curate information or do governance in a decentralized way and provide the tools required to create their own “artist in the cloud” and how to utilise the multimodal deep networks to create abstract text-to-image visualizations in their own artistic practice.
The workshop doesn’t require any prior experience in maths or coding, due to the hands-on nature of the workshop we encourage participants to bring their own laptops.
If you have any questions please write to
info@iklectikartlab.com
To read more about the Abraham project, please visit:
https://medium.com/@genekogan/artist-in-the-cloud-8384824a75c7
digital selves
digital selves is a London-based computer musician who uses algorithms of synthesis and samples to create improvised, crunchy sounds and melodic texture. They have performed at various events in the UK and internationally and use the programming mini-language TidalCycles to create algorithmic music that recontextualizes club culture, experimental art and human-computer interaction. Some recent works include collaborations with the BBC’s research and development department, hosting feminist hackathons with Leeds International Festival, running live coding workshops with the V&A and Music Hackspace, and featuring in the “Artist DIY” documentary series in FACT magazine.
https://lwlsn.github.io/digitalselves-web/
https://www.factmag.com/2020/06/09/artist-diy-digital-selves/
Louis McCallum
Louis has been making music with algorithms for 15 years and his current project, EverySongIOwn is a quantity approach to performance. After finding a hard drive containing his entire teenage music collection, Louis uses neural networks to try and make some sense of this as he improvises with 1000s of songs as his source material live.
louismccallum.com
https://soundcloud.com/skatterbrainz
