Artificial Intelligence is woven into our everyday reality and we can no longer ignore it. This year's Day of Applied Research is fully dedicated to AI. AI can be a great tool, but there are risks. To navigate this new reality, dialogue and research is more urgent than ever.
This year’s event took place in the beautiful Hulstkamp Gebouw at the Maaskade, Rotterdam. In three different halls and at the AI Expo, more than 30 researchers, teacher-researchers, lecturers will present their AI-related research they do for Hogeschool Rotterdam. Per programme, different knowledge centres of Hogeschool Rotterdam hall work together for this comprehensive programme. The day closed off with drinks and a vegan 5 course dinner.
During this day, WdKA hosted the AI expo hall: a place for innovation and connection. Here, projects by students and teachers were presented. It was a great opportunity to learn more about the projects and meet the creators and thinkers behind them. Below you can find an overview of the projects presented by the WdKA community (students, teachers, alumni).
gURL - a project by Studio Comrades (alumni Nicol Colga and Edith Dingemans)
This project is a speculative and 2.5Dimensional teenage bedroom installation, exploring the effects of digitisation, attempts to CTRL external entities, self-expression and finding "retreat" in (digital) worlds in the year 2032.
Consisting of an 80-page teen magazine, an audio track, face filters, 3D clothing and various custom-made gURL items and objects. Nominated for "The Willem de Kooning Research Award 2022" and Dutch Design Week's Manifestations "Young Talent Award 2022".
Studio Comrades is a Rotterdam-based interdisciplinary design studio working within the intersection of graphic design, new technologies and topics of social relevance. You can find more information by visiting their Website , Instagram or Facebook page.
3% of everything - a project by alumna Gill Baldwin
3% of Everything is a response to the increase of data surveillance in our daily lives. Set in a world where machines are viewing our interior, the sculpture acts as the opposite of camouflage by actively being detected by object recognition software. Made by 3d scanning objects in her apartment, assembling digital hybrids and 3D printing the results, these objects reside within multiple categories therefore confusing and lowering the confidence score of the software producing invaluable data.
In her work, Gill Baldwin studies our relationship with the artificial. Zooming in on technology, machinery, intelligence, and the particularities of on- and offline worlds, Baldwin carefully maps potential repercussions and consequences of the ever-transforming kinship between humans and (technologic) artificiality; human made objects and phenomena on the verge of becoming autonomous. Want to know more about her work? Check out here Instagram, website or LinkedIn page.
Algortihm(e) - a project by graphic design graduate Ruben Staps
Biometric surveillance technology is the technology that makes it possible for law enforcement to track you personally while you are on your daily commute. This technology is able to recognise you because it’s trained with all the images you post on social media. This means that when you choose to give up your online privacy, you also give up a lot of your offline privacy.
Algorithm(e) acts as a proposed way to deal with this contradiction, and is as a protest of the constant governing of the digital – and with that – the physical body. It can’t be tracked, governed, controlled or nudged, as is not a human being, but just a reflection of one. It doesn’t browse the internet, rather it lives inside the browser. It surfs the transatlantic communication cables, flies trough disk space, and chills in the clouds, unnoticed by its algorithmic brothers and sisters that where born to control.
Algorithm(e) is a generative adversarial network that runs in constant feedback loop, it learns from experiences as it grows older, in search for a new identity. Algorithm(e) takes away my fear of missing out, it allows me to go unnoticed and noticed at the same time trough the means of my new digital body.
Do you want to know more about Ruben’s work? Visit his website or Instagram page.
AI-MAPS- a collaboration between numerous institutions, presented by ginger coons (research lecturer at WdKA)
AI-MAPS is an ELSA AI (Ethical, Legal, and Societal Aspects of AI) lab pursuing the development of an ecosystem of trust and support for AI-assisted public safety promotion. In a variety of use cases, benefits and safeguards are analyzed against the private-public-machine agency backdrop, based on a collaboration between researchers, the private sector, the public sector, and social participants.
At the A| exposition, visitors were asked questions about their opinion regarding AI implementations. Such as: Is it possible to prevent AI from being biased / discriminatory? How do CCTV / security cameras in public space make you feel? Who should control AI that makes choices about your life? What role should governments play in developing AI? By including social participants, the project aims to create more trust in technological innovations that support public values and respect human rights.
Narcissus- a project by 3rd year student Chaline Bang
The interactive installation visualizes the moral of decentering ourselves and the abstract blur of identity while looking into our phones. While we watch ourselves blur, having less privacy and dealing with lack of transparency, we are simultaneously facing (capitalistic) programmed algorithms, data extraction and mass surveillance. The longer we are looking into our phones, the more we have to consider its environmental and social cost. While the screened image gets sharp and clear by looking in the installations direct environment are we and our actions too? With this project, Chaline questions phone usage by eye detection and interactive screened face pixelation.
Want to know more? Visit Chaline’s website.
GEO-Decoy - a project by graphic design graduate Mats Cornegoor
“At the beginning of 2022, I discovered that for the past 3 years my Android phone has been tracking my location data and sending in to Google servers in the US. My daily visits to work, school, supermarkets and bars were all being recorded. I never imagined that this happens when I’m not even using my phone. This concern lead me to conduct experiments and investigate how geolocation tracking technology works. On its own, this technology isn’t harmful, but it is highly susceptible for exploitation. Big Tech earns money by selling your location data, and it might even end up in a government database used for mass surveillance - shocking right?”
As a response to this tracking ecosystem, Mats created GEO-Decoy. GEO-Decoy is a dissident interactive machine, which reclaims location privacy by outputting decoy WiFi signals to create a space of uncertainty. The signals confuse the Big Tech tracking algorithms to the point where they will never be able to find the exact location of nearby smartphones. Flickering between locations, these smartphones are seemingly everywhere and nowhere all at once.
More information? You can read more about the project here, or check out his Instagram or LinkedIn page.
Yuru Kyara: Machine Learning x Animation - a project by animation graduate Lok Thong Siu
'Yuru Kyara' is an exploration of combining (hand drawn) character animation with machine learning generated visuals, born out of a desire to be less rigid and more playful in the artistic process. The graduation film of Başak Kirici, Ming Stotijn, Teodora Tiţescu, Corina Bojan and Lok Thong Siu: 'ZEZE & MERCEDES', a 2D animated short about two kids racing each other and their imaginary friends through gradually life-threatening obstacles in a game of pretend, inspired the datasets of Japanese mascots, the would-be imaginary creatures inhabiting the parade of Zeze and Mercedes' fantasy play. The surrealistic quality of the generated mascot characters by the StyleGAN and the hand drawn component introduced by Pix2PixHD form the basis of this project and will be partly implemented in the film.
DeepMemory- a project by alumnus Yori Ettema
DeepMemory is a portmanteau of Deepfake and Memory. For this, he uses algorithms to composite a person’s face onto someone else’s body. By doing so he is creating the effect of seeing oneself acting in an event they haven’t been in. Thus creating an unseen perspective of the self. This is a powerful observation tool that is used to objectively perceive what is actually happening when a person (stand-in actor with their face) are confronted with their fears. A DeepMemory can be used to rewire your memory. A specific event that produces (for instance) the feeling of helplessness can not produce the feeling of being in control at the same time. Therefore these emotions are in competition with each other to embed themselves in your memory.
Interested to learn more about Yori’s work or DeepMemory? Visit www.yorie.nl or check this documentary about Deep Fake that includes Yori’s project.
Stable Diffusion - a tool used and presented by WdKA teacher Boris Smeenk
With new artificial intelligence (AI) text-to-image generators such as OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 and Google’s Imagen, artists around the world raised the question: Will AI make art obsolete? At the day of Practice-Based Research people were invited to explore an open-source variation of DALL·E 2, named Stable Diffusion to generate images from a sentence. By understanding image synthesis and generating your own images, you can question the artistic value of AI synthesized images and define your position as an image maker within these new techniques.
Stable Diffusion is a tool used by the academy for students to explore the possibilities of AI and art and use it as a new technique for the creation of images.
