Electric Dreaming: Artificial Intelligence in Culture and Art
This event will bring together artists, AI researchers and community experts to showcase the potentials and pitfalls of AI for the art industry.
As part of The Electric Dreaming Ethical AI Residency Programme, this event considers the challenges of the art industry (art-making which meets contemporary audiences’ expectations; expanding to new audiences; and achieving net zero) and how AI could be positioned to help address them.
The artists’ residency programme has been set up by artists BRiGHTBLACK, in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. While in Cambridge, the artists are supported by ÌÇÐÄVlog as artists in residence.
BRiGHTBLACK's Simon Wilkinson and Myra Appannah will kick off the event by explaining the three critical challenges facing the culture industry and how AI might be harnessed to help address them.
One of the artists in residence, Willow Ritchie, will share some of what they have achieved as Level-3 Festivals co-director. They have spent the past two years exploring use of ChatGPT and other large language models as access tools for neurodivergent artists, and how they are helping neurodivergent people bypass barriers to entry in becoming full time professional artists.
Following talks from the artists in residence, Level-3 Festival will give a demonstration of AI art tools in gaming and open the discussion out to a panel of invited experts and the room at large.
BRiGHTBLACK is the company of multidisciplinary artists Simon Wilkinson and Myra Appannah. Their work combines video game and immersive technologies with metaverse spaces, AI, music, live performance and a co-creation production model in which the artists and their audiences evolve the artworks together as they tour. Their work has featured at Tate Modern and toured 36 nations in the past decade.
Simon has been described as "one of the most notable names in Europe to be dealing with VR" by CINEUROPA MAGAZINE.
Myra was the Creative Lead on "one of the most influential British immersive productions from the last 20 years" [UK Research and Innovation].
Level-3 Festival supports neurodivergent artists to make and exhibit video game-based artworks, to build their skills and to make an income from their work. Set up in 1997 with an ethos evolving out of the DIY rave culture, Level-3 specifically seeks to help neurodivergent artists bypass the barriers to entry in becoming full-time professional artists. Level-3 co-directors Simon Wilkinson and Willow Ritchie are themselves neurodivergent artists and in the past two years they have been exploring the use of ChatGPT as an access tool for neurodivergent people.
