Sydney Seebach, Ava Schultz and Cody Witt, “Generation to Generation: Conversing With Kindred Technologies”
Mentor: Nathaniel Stern, English, Art & Design, Arts (Peck School of the)
Poster #125
Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies is an AI-centric art exhibition that explores how humans and technology have always evolved together. This immersive, traveling show blends the past, present, and future of technology – including language, film, computers, and more – through physical, digital, and text-based media. Inviting viewers to consider their relationships and attitudes towards current and emerging technologies, the show and supplemental catalog act as both an action and a call to action. Generation to Generation provokes a reflection on how technology both enhances and evolves our understandings of politics and society, matter and nature, our world and ourselves. New technologies – with Artificial Intelligence being the latest and most rapidly changing form – should induce neither blind optimism, nor crippling fear. The research encourages nuanced discourse about its place in our personal lives, relationships, and broader society. The unifying element of a font created by AI creates an aesthetic that challenges technology itself. Asking and answering these questions has seen the production of a monumental, poetic landscape of reclaimed electronic waste; an interactive mirror that “reads” human movement and translates it into dynamic code; a print- and image-based installation, featuring a custom AI font that evolves past human understanding, beyond the limits of the screen or page; play-based installation of stencils, coloring books, and paint; concrete poetry made of precious metals recovered from mining slag and computer waste — alchemized artifacts of digital communication; and, media-rich (generative/oral/aural/digital) performances of AI-powered poetry, updating an ancient art form for the approaching posthuman age. Neural Networks, as well as novel understandings of natural networks – are enabling and enhancing unique forms of creative exploration in and with various matter and materials, life and non-life. Generation to Generation hopes to open up those spaces for even greater exploration.