A new cultural collaboration between the Goethe-Institut Glasgow and the Alliance Française Glasgow(together with the Institut Français d’Ecosse) aims at uniting technology and art, thus creating a new approach to an increasingly central topic. In response to the impact felt by the cultural sector as a result of the Covid-19 global health crisis, we have reframed our initial residency project and transformed it into a purely digital one. The French and German cultural centres based in Scotland invited three contemporary artists based in France, Scotland and Germany to apply for this digital residency programme taking place between November 2020 and December 2021.
Digital Residency - New Forms of Togetherness
Three international contemporary artists have been selected to participate in the digital residency ‘New Forms of Togetherness’ which will contribute to the interdisciplinary discourse between Contemporary Visual Art and the topic of Artificial Intelligence taking place until December 2021. Yet the discourse surrounding AI is still mainly taking place in the technology sector. This digital residency aims at uniting technology and art, thus creating a new approach to an increasingly central topic. Therefore, the remote residency will support the three artists to continue their research and work with our partners' support: The National Library of Scotland, the Social Brain in Action Lab, NEoN Digital Arts and the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.
The Selected Artists:
Siri Black (Germany / Scotland)
Siri Black lives and works in Glasgow. Her work is the love child of anachronism and technophilia. Siri works across analogue and digital photography, film and sound to create installations that seek to trace instances of the couching of state power with technological prowess. Important is the detritus left in the wake of accelerated progress; the gaps in archives, the not so easily translate-able entanglements.
Siri's research is often conducted through collaborations with other art practitioners and scientists. With a keen focus on the means of image production and distribution, her moving image work often points to its own material process, thereby aiming to question the existence of an objective or lossless transmission of knowledge.
Libby Odai (Scotland)Libby Odai is a creative technologist based in Glasgow that has a background in developing and producing sculpture and performance with digital elements. She has previously produced digital works shown at Dancebase Edinburgh, The University of Edinburgh, Plat:form and the Swap Market in Govanhill.
Her programming work focuses on bridging the gap between digital concepts and the physical world, making technology more accessible. By blending traditional arts such as dance and crochet with high tech components, she hopes to bring tech to new diverse audiences, bridging the STEM gap and exploring the creative applications of new technology. Fundamental to her work is breaking down technology barriers, and educational activism around issues of digital discrimination is a core component.
She is also the co-founder and owner of Sugar and Spin Skate Crew, which programs community rollerskating classes, performances and events. Through this, she has built a community of roller skaters in Glasgow, bringing the sport to new audiences. She specifically works to engage women and non-binary people and the LGBTIQ and POC communities, which are often marginalised in traditional fitness settings, though a new fun way to achieve health and wellbeing.
Marion Carré (France)Marion carries out several activities in parallel: entrepreneur, teacher, speaker, author and artist. All of these approaches allow her to explore the relationships between art and artificial intelligence from different angles. She started working on this subject when she co-founded Ask Mona in 2017. Ask Mona is a startup that mobilizes artificial intelligence to bring audiences and cultural institutions together and to help make culture more accessible.
Gradually, she led in parallel a more theoretical exploration of the subject which she shared through talks, teaching and a book entitled ‘Art and Artificial intelligence. Artist in the making?' published in March 2020. She also explores this art / artificial intelligence dialectic from the angle of creation. After learning how to code by herself, she added a new tool to her artistic practice: machine learning.
She believes that art is a formidable counterweight to artificial intelligence. She explores through her work the sum of subjectivities that make up our relationship to reality. As artificial intelligence encodes our knowledge by learning from it to reproduce our reasoning on a larger scale, it reveals our perception of the world around us.
