Tech for Democracy
A 30 meter long AI-powered generative installation speculating into the technological utopias and dystopias of tomorrow.
Trained on a dataset of human articulations of their democratic future entangled with technology, the Tech for Democracy artwork is a futuristic speculation into the utopias and dystopias of tomorrow. The 30 meter long large scale immersive installation, which premiered at the center of the United Nation’s UN City in Copenhagen, employs artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms in the generation of its own speculative futures in a manner that pushes past the limitations of our collective imaginations.
Encountering the artwork, audiences are confronted by a visceral audio and visual experience as they are presented with a cacophony of AI generated discursive and image-based predictions for the future of human-technology entanglement. Predictions expressed in the form of a combination of written and read aloud text, visual manifestations, and musical compositions. All of which generated from the bespoke machine learning algorithms composing the Tech for Democracy artwork.
At its core, the work itself is a provocative reflection and scrutinization upon how we as humans today allow current technological development dictate what we imagine for the future – rather than allowing what we can imagine dictate the direction and progression of our technological development.
In addition to its physical manifestation the artwork can also be experienced through an online platform where audiences are able to engage directly with the AI artwork by posing their own utopian/dystopian articulations of how they imagine the future relationship between technology and democracy to be. Hereby adding their reflections to the AI’s expansive dataset, enabling the algorithm to have richer futuristic dreams over time as the work continues to evolve.
Exhibitions:
Artwork:
Tech for Democracy
Artist:
Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm
ARTificial Mind:
Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, Artist
Cody Lukas, Assistant Artist
Alexander Krog, Software Engineer
Jens Hegner Strærmose, Software Engineer
Asbjørn Olling, Software Engineer
Year:
2021
Media:
Interactive bespoke artificial intelligence technology utilizing Machine Learning, Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (VQGAN + CLIP), Natural Language Processing (NLP) Transformer Models, GPT-J, Speech Synthesis (TTS). Webapp.
Dataset: The machine learning algorithms have been fed information from a myriad of online articulations of predicted technology related utopian and dystopian futures scraped from various online reports and forums.
Exhibited at:
UN City Copenhagen
Commissioned by: