Conversations
with Computers

While computing finally has become ubiquitous, it has fragmented as well. Today, it appears in countless forms, pretending to be usable, tangible, intelligent, natural, and human. At the same time, user behavior is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from computation. Humans appear as software extensions, as appendages to machines. On the other hand, the stunning achievements of computation themselves often turn out to be forms of hidden human labor. If we assume that it is indeed “computers all the way down” it might be time to ask what a computer actually is – and to return to the roots of the term.

Lasse Scherffig is an artist and researcher with a focus on interaction, cybernetics and the complex relationship of humans, machines and society. He teaches Interaction Design at Köln International School of Design and has taught at San Francisco Art Institute, Bauhaus University Weimar, and Academy of Media Arts Cologne. His work has been published and exhibited internationally.

The premise of automation and a post-work future seems irresistible. While the automation discourse steers in the direction of technological inevitability and the replacement of human work, its underlying infrastructures expose a very different picture. This talk reflects on the hidden labour within computational systems and critically explores the narrative of automation's technocratic fantasies, which hides the human and their labour behind a precisely positioned technological determinism, trying to draw them obsolete. The accompanied works find great inspiration within the field of digital anthropology and take a cultural approach: they treat the lived experiences of people involved in the production of necessary datasets and automated engagement as the subject for theorising the complicated structures of contemporary digital capital.

Conrad Weise is a Cologne/Cluj based artist and researcher. In his work he looks at socio-political settings where he locates computation and its implications. Through investigative and computational approaches from within these systems, his works attempt to contextualise the intransparent and uncertain arrangements. His current research focuses in particular on the hidden labour and automated engagement within computational systems.

Imagine it's 2040, and you are living together in a collaborative network of diverse digital entities. The project "How are you, my digital friend?" investigates the possibilities of inscribing the "vibrant matter" (Bennet, 2020) of "emotions" (Damasio, 2011) in a socio-technical interface in HCI. Living and working in coexistence with digital actants means that we begin an intimate relationship with them. In this fiction, digital actants can show us their emotion and react emotionally to a particular situation. Emotions are part of the human experience and play a significant role in our life, (maybe) even more extensive than the rational one.
According to the repertoire of the emotional digital machines, the interaction can vary greatly. A subtle-dominant thing is more likely to show its anger and rage if faced with an unpleasant situation. In contrast, a submissive-friendly thing is more likely to react anxiously to the same problem. The emotional repertoire of a thing and the definition of emotional triggers/appeals involves inscribing cultural values and socio-political aspects.
What sorts of emotions/moods are relevant for interaction in the coexistence of humans and machines?
*Digital Best Friends Forever

Marianne Lechner is a specialist in user experience. She teaches UX/UI as an associate professor at the Institute of Visual Communication of the University of Art and Design Linz. Together with Tina Frank and Sabine Kienzer, she developed splace magazine – a digital multi-format of the University of Art and Design Linz for interactive art encounters in space, word and image. In the last 4 years, her focus has been on communication between people and the Internet of Things. (IoT). At the moment she is working on her PhD which deals with the simulation of an emotional repertoire in a smart living context. 

A big number of audiences online nowadays is mainly algorithms. Algorithms are trained on the auditory information, that is produced and uploaded by humans. In the video 'Not allowed for algorithmic audiences', an Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA), situated in the extremely hot city of Athens in Greece, exhibits an odd behavior. They borrow an avatar and appear before their users. For a brief period of time, for seven consecutive days before they shut down for ever and end up in an e-waste, the IPA goes into seven monologues. During their length of operation, they have managed to scan the entire contents of the Internet and gather all sorts of information, information that they long to share. The IPA uses their seven brief monologues as an opportunity to introduce themselves, talk about their skills, their ancestors, their anatomy and origins, and about voice and its significance. They reveal data regarding the listening infrastructure as well as the social dysfunctions on which their programming and operation are based. Just before they reach the end of their monologues, in a final effort to reconcile humans and machines, they share tips with humans on how they can manage… not to be heard by algorithms

Kyriaki Goni is an Athens born and based artist. Working across disciplines and technologies, she creates multimedia installations. She connects the local with the global by critically touching on questions of surveillance, distributed networks and infrastructures, ecosystems, human and other than human relations. Her works get exhibited worldwide in solo and group shows. Recent solo shows were presented at Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens; Aksioma, Ljibjana; Drugo More, Rijeka. Recent group shows 13th Shanghai Biennale, Ars Electronica2021, Modern Love (or the Lone in the Age of Cold Intimacies) etc. She has published in Leonardo and Neural Magazine and presented at conferences such as ISEA and SIGGRAPH. She is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts with an MA in Digital Arts, before that she had pursued a BA and an MSc in Cultural Anthropology and Developmental Sociology from Leiden University.

Deliberately weird programming languages made their first appearance in the 70’s, when many of the computational concepts and paradigms taken for granted today were still being formed and explored. Today, even though there is a wide variety of programming languages available, only a small fraction of them explores what is beyond the conformant models of what could be considered our day-to-day human-computer interaction, usually because their highly experimental and challenging qualities prevents them from being introduced to a larger public or incorporated by the software industry.
This niche but prolific community introduces programmers, artists, computer scientists, linguists and the curious to new possibilities that challenge and subvert the preconceived notions of high-performant, westernized, and English-spoken rules of computation, incessantly pushing the boundaries on the limits of computation, representation and logic systems, inspiring us to see how radically different computation could have been – and may become - with the interesting languages that are yet to be found.

Mariana Marangoni is a Brazilian artist and researcher based in London, whose work explores the materiality of media and new forms of narrative. Her interdisciplinary practice takes many forms, from web-based experiments to sculptural installations. Recent work has been focused on critical explorations of the Internet crisis, the aesthetics of decay in digital media, and the potentialities of esoteric programming languages in arborescent structures. She holds a MA in Interaction Design at the London College of Communication and is currently an Associate Lecturer at the University of the Arts London and a part of the Supra Systems Studio as a Research Assistant.

Esolangs are experiential art: the nature of a language is revealed by programs exploring its logic and eccentricities. So it seems very odd to deliberately create an esolang that has no valid programs. Yet there are many esolangs that exist as pure idea-art; those that can run only in our heads. These include self-contradictory rulesets, ambiguous languages, or perfectly well-defined ones that only run on computers that break the physical laws of our universe. By refusing to acquiesce to runnability, these esolang offer the sharpest critique of how we define language, code, and computer.

Daniel Temkin makes images, programming languages, and interactive pieces that use the machine as a place of confrontation between logic and human irrationality. His blog and research project esoteric.codes documents work engaging with the text of code, including experimental programming languages, code art, and other systems that break from the norms of computing. It was the 2014 recipient of the ArtsWriters.org grant, further developed at the New Museum's New Inc tech incubator in 2018, and exhibited at ZKM in 2018 - 2019. He has published in Leonardo and World Picture Journal and presented at conferences such as SXSW, GLI.TC/H, and SIGGRAPH. His work has been a critic's pick for Art News and the New York Times. 

Contemporary computer art is smooth — from the characteristic look and transformations of GANs to the ongoing pursuit of higher resolutions and faster processes. In this way, even critical art’s aesthetics can serve support the ideology of AI as all-seeing facilitator of a better future, rather than as the bias-laundering facilitator of a brutal capitalism — one in which the actual is subsumed by the probable. This talk will briefly outline examples of the former before considering optional ways to work with computers that reveal their weak points and limitations, and reconfigure the relationship between machines and people away from the current mechanization-as-progress teleology.

Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo is an artist, programmer, and erstwhile data designer. Her practice centers around methods to make computers and data more humane — more accessible, more flexible, more contextual. Her works include data-obscured art sites, new computer languages, and hybrid nostalgia machines. She’s an alumna of the School for Poetic Computation, Recurse Center, Brown University, and NYU Tandon.

Natalya Serkova recently suggested that we're seeing a trend in the newest corners of the art world that tries to go beyond the post-internet label. In my talk, I will try to engage with her statement through the artistic practice of Slovenian artist Matej Mihevc and his newest project defnot_abot. In his project, Mihevc scrapes the images from different Instagram artists associated with the post-internet art, and then, in the second step, the collected dataset is accessed by a generative adversarial network (GAN) that through the established latent space selects a random coordinate each day, from which the image is generated and then published to the defnot_abot Instagram account. I will argue that in Mihevc practice we see a potential for a new kind of aesthetic expression, i.e. the generic. I will try to substantiate this claim with additional examples from Spotify and Balenciaga to Tzvetnik curatorial practice and explain in what way are these approaches different. How are they positioned in terms of meaning making, intentionality, artistic expression and the talk of the posthuman.

Maks Valenčič is finishing his Master's degree in Communication Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana, and will soon be a Research Fellow at The New Centre for Research & Practice. He's a managing editor of Šum: journal for art and theory-fiction and a co-founder of Fast Right blog. His main theoretical interests revolve around accelerationism, neorationalism and non-standard philosophy. 

Ekheo is a duo, formed by Aude Langlois and Belinda Sykora, that explores the crosslines of the musical, visual and sonic art of performance. Equipped with synthesizers, microphones, instruments and projectors, Ekheo creates a transcendent and dreamlike ambient, that drags viewers and listeners onto a psychedelic trip and expands one's perception of sound and vision. Each performance is unique, since improvisation, adaption to surroundings and communication between each other is key to the world of Ekheo. Nonetheless, there is an overall thread and distinctive approach, that carries each performance. They are occasionally joined by the jamaican-born and New York-raised Rodger Brown, who works as a multidimensional artist in Berlin and takes care of the visual aspect of Ekheo.  Aude and Belinda met at university, while studying “Sound Studies” at the Berlin UdK (Universität der Künste). They are both dedicated and experienced musicians, that focus on interdisciplinary art. Although they are both multi-faceted artists, Belinda focusses on binaural sound walks, sound installations, radio plays and performances, while Aude works on the interceptions of music, sound design and technology. Before they met, Belinda was a studied actress in Vienna, while Aude finished “Music and Musicology” at the Sorbonne University in Paris. This concert is the sonic trace of the silicon friend camp and our ongoing research about the voice, improvisational music and AI.