INFORMATION:
31.01.25, 6.30 PM
Newspeak House, E2 7DG
DESCRIPTION:
We are excited for our next event, contributing to “Art Made AI”, hosted by Restless Egg and TxP. The event will bring together artists, engineers, policymakers, and investors for an evening exploring artistic methods in AI development through demos, discussion, DJs, and dance.
Please register through the link and find out more about co-host, Sylvan Rackham (founder of Restless Egg) through our interview below…
INTERVIEW with sylvan rackham:
by Soyoung Choi
What is Restless Egg and how did it start?
Restless Egg is a project that I think has been going on since I was 18. I grew up as a singer, as well as with a real fascination for science. I studied it in my A levels and then I did engineering in my undergraduate. However, throughout this journey, I was always doing a lot of singing as well. There’s always been this tension between the engineering and science side and the performative artistic side.
For example, during my degree, I got interested in the idea of the cultural contingency of engineering. My focus was on Japan and manufacturing processes and how some of them could work in Japan and not elsewhere. So, even though the electronic products still worked, the manufacturing processes weren’t once exported to different countries. This started a strange journey of looking at where technology comes from, how it's created, and how we can steer it. So looking at it from its cultural roots, rather than just from a pure engineering metallic perspective. I then started working at a company that invested in scientists to help them become start-up founders, and, again, it was really interesting but there was still something that didn’t feel like it was quite touching.
So I did some residencies and fellowships around philosophy, art and technology. We’ve built some prototypes, some online artistic and technological experiments, and some video games… and in this process, I found there is a type of person who, rather than seeing art and technology as two separate disciplines, understood them to be one unified discipline. But these people are outliers. They seem like technologists to art institutions and artists to technology institutions. So, the point of Restless Egg was to create a place where these people could develop their expertise and work on projects that no other institution would allow them to work on. That’s how we came to this idea of the “artistry in technology”: it’s people who understand technology to be a form of creative medium that can be experimented with to find out the new features and affordances of technology rather than trying to rush in to answer a very particular question. We think that from this type of experimentation, the next wave of energy products will be born.
Why is it important to talk about AI and Art and how do you think the relationship between the two is evolving?
I think it’s evolving a lot in terms of the questions that we use to work and create. I think that the questions that we're having to ask ourselves now in relationship to AI are the ones that are best addressed by that group of people that have not been traditionally included in the technological development process, the artists that have been often left to speculate on the side. Now, I've seen a few companies and products emerge that come from people with an art practice, and they seem to hold a quality to them that is very distinct from start-up culture. In any accelerator, incubator or start-up panel talk, they would ask, “What is the question that you're addressing? What is your market?”. This looks at institutions or areas that already exist and that you can tap into. However, I think the most interesting technologies are the ones that are shaped in the way that we live and that create a new type of person. They sort of articulate something about the present that nobody else can see, that nobody else can articulate.
This is why I think art is important in this moment for AI, and that the questions that are being asked now are “What is creativity in the broadest sense?” “What is the relationship between human and technology, human and machine?” “What is the role of the machine now?” No longer is it just an industrial process where there are inputs and outputs and where we can tweak the algorithm. You can tweak the protocol and you can change the outputs, but now you have a type of technology that is exploratory. It looks much more like an ecological system and the only way you can get to know it is through sort of an empirical investigation.
This sort of empirical investigation is just a point of treating it like a medium in a way that an artist gets. You know, a ceramicist understands the world through clay and can sort of “see with their hands” whether if they put a little bit of pressure on one side whilst they're turning the wheel, they'll be able to create a lip or break it. This is something that they can write or read books about, but really, they have to be in the clay to understand it. And that's what I see as an artistic method, an artistic approach. It's not to say that only those who have gone to art school can have this approach to AI. I think there are many AI engineers who also have this approach, but it's about sort of allowing them to articulate it as such, rather than seeing it as always about solving a problem. I think that an answer to one of the biggest questions, “What is AI for?” will come from this type of approach, from treating AI as a medium rather than as a tool or a solution.
I agree. I guess there's maybe a fear around what AI represents in the world, in the world of art. But I think we should embrace it in order to really understand what humans can do and what AI can do. And then try and build healthy dynamics between AI and humanity and creativity. That’s why we look forward to “Art Made AI”. What was the inspiration behind this event? And how did your collaboration with TxP start?
TXP stands for tech and policy and our collaboration is part of the journey that I've been through in trying to find what makes or shapes technology. Policies have such an important role, and they are often understood to be boring bureaucratic paperwork done in civil service. There are definitely elements of truth in that, but I think policy is also another form of storytelling that defines technology, one of the many, and a very important one. It's one that controls so much money. The amount of money that governments have to put towards the development of technology is astronomical. When we look back at many of the biggest technologies, they were funded for use by the US military, for example through research and development funding agencies such as the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency, These are policy decisions. In the UK, the government research funding agency, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency or ARIA, has £800 million to invest in science and the applications of technology. So, this is the importance of policy here.
TxP is bringing a really interesting group of people together to find the implications and most important areas around this policy, and to try understand what form of governance is adequate to meet the needs of a world that is increasingly mediated by technology, We can't just fall back into a very technocratic area where everyone is technologically literate. We need people who are lawmakers, storytellers, educators. However, they need to understand the technology and the technology needs to understand them. That's the TxP community and the project that I see them doing. And they are also friends, Andrew, one of the co-founders, is one of my closest friends and we have spoken about all sorts of different things…tech, policy, AI, love. I guess my ambition and belief is that the way we will make great institutions or events is actually through these very close connections and from a place of deep trust and that’s sort of why this collaboration is here.
The inspiration for the event is partly the Restless Egg methodology, understanding artistic methods as being an integral part of technological development. And being increasingly so, as the new type of artist-founder becomes more technologically literate and wants to have an effect on the world that is not just in a gallery space, but in the hands of a thousand million people. How can they do this? What are the implications if they try to do it? On the other hand, how can governments and policy create institutions and spaces for these people? Of course they can start out being at the fringe or with small events like the one that we’ll be hosting. But I think the desire is for this to become something that is at the scale of, I don't know, something like human-centred design became such an integral part of industrial design, of UX design, the digital and physical product. I think the ambition is to create something that makes it so obvious that, rather than the slightly colder, more technological focus, you need to have an aesthetic, artistic world in order to make technology that addresses people's needs.
Special thanks to:
Sylvan Rackham (founder of Restless Egg)
Olivia Kusio
Nayoung Lee
Poster from: Restless Egg and TxP