Creative Technologies Seminar
We are delighted to share with you the launch of a new community in the field of Creative Technologies in Aalto University. Our purpose is to raise the quality of research in the area of creative technology among the international network of researchers in Aalto University. As one of the first actions, we are organizing a new series of monthly seminars starting in September 2022. The seminars will feature high-level speakers both from Aalto and the wider international community of creative technology researchers.
We welcome you to our first Creative Technologies seminar on the 8 September. At this first event we will have presentations from Koray Tahiroğlu (Aalto University) and Luba Elliott. Luba Elliott is a curator, producer and researcher specializing in artificial intelligence in the creative industries. Koray Tahiroğlu is a musician, Academy Research Fellow and lecturer in the Department of Media, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture.
The event was streamed live at the time.
SCHEDULE
14.00 Opening words | Antti Oulasvirta, Aalto University
14.05 Take an AI model, Break it Down and Exploit it Creatively | Koray Tahiroğlu, Aalto University
This is something we know, advanced computational technologies do challenge the practices of creative practitioners. By looking at the recent development of AI methods and deep learning models, it appears that these technologies have already penetrated the creative practices and this transformation is now impacting the ways in which artists, designers, musicians, writers, etc., act on their creative work, offering a new perspective that redefines human-technology relationship. In my talk I will critically reflect on how as an artist-researcher I apply computational technologies to music practices that use digital musical instruments, often to things they were not meant to be applied to. This presentation will suggest that computation is an integral part of digital music practices, inseparable part of the artistic process today and beyond the traditional studio-recording-editing domain, it influences the methods and processes of our creative works; how music is composed, performed, experienced, shared and distributed.
14.35 AI Art: Finding its Place between Technology, Contemporary Art and NFT | Luba Elliott
The past few years have seen the development of AI art as a trend. From its beginnings with DeepDream and style transfer to GANs, GPT-3 and DALL-E, AI art has long moved beyond the world of research and academia to find itself straddling the worlds of media and contemporary art and now NFTs. The contemporary art world's fascination with the social impact of facial recognition, recommendation systems and deep fakes has encouraged artists to explore AI critically as subject matter, while NFTs have shifted the focus back to aesthetics. This talk will give an overview of how artists and technologists are using and thinking about machine learning, its creative potential and societal impact.
Please make sure to save the following dates for the upcoming seminars:
6 October
3 November
1 December
Creative Technologies community collaborates with Aalto Digital Creatives which is a pre-incubator program tailored for the creative industries. They both utilise the MAGICS infrastructure for human virtualisation.
Koray Tahiroğlu is a musician, Academy Research Fellow and lecturer in the Department of Media, Aalto University School of ARTS. He is the founder and head of SOPI (Sound and Physical Interaction) research group, coordinating research projects with interests including embodied approaches to sonic interaction, new interfaces for musical expression, deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with audio. Since 2004, he has been also teaching workshops and courses introducing artistic strategies and methodologies for creating interactive music. Tahiroğlu has performed experimental music in collaboration as well as in solo performances in Europe, North America and Australia. His work has been presented in important venues, such as Ars Electronica, AI x Music Festival, STEIM, TodaysArt and Audio Art Festival. In 2018, he was awarded a 5-year Academy of Finland Research Fellowship.
Luba Elliott is a curator, writer and researcher specialising in artificial intelligence in art. She works to educate and engage the broader public about the latest developments in creative AI through talks and exhibitions at venues across the art, business and technology spectrum including Impakt Festival, The Serpentine Galleries, arebyte, The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, CogX, NeurIPS and ICCV. Her recent projects include the Feral File exhibition 'Reflections in the Water' and the ART-AI Festival in Leicester, UK. She founded the NeurIPS Creativity and Design Workshop and curates the online galleries aiartonline.com and computervisionart.com. She is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence. Prior to that, she worked in start-ups, including the art collector database Larry’s List. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge and has a certificate in Design Thinking from the Hasso-Plattner-Institute D-school in Potsdam.
Further information:
Katja Reinikka
Producer | Aalto Digital Creatives | Aalto Studios
050 434 8872 | [email protected]
Aalto Digital Creatives
Aalto Digital Creatives pre-incubator programme aims to help creative industry students, researchers and practitioners on their path towards entrepreneurship. The programme is supported by the City of Helsinki and it’s part of Helsinki-based higher education institutions’ campus incubators network. Aalto Digital Creatives programme is coordinated by Aalto Startup Center and Aalto Studios.
MAGICS – Media – Arts – Games – Interaction – Computing – Science
MAGICS is an infrastructure network to support research into motion recording, and virtual environments. It is a joint effort of Aalto University, Tampere University and the University of the Arts Helsinki.
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