Body of Knowledge

Can computers see gender? Without being trained in traditional binary notions of gender what can they produce? And how do we interpret the results? J. Rosenbaum presents a paper on their project Hidden Worlds, an exhibition of Artificial Intelligence Computer Generated artworks and mobile Augmented Reality technologies to see gender through the lens of computer vision. Rosenbaum’s last works used AI to interpret their creations, this time the computer creates the art and Rosenbaum interprets the output. A Generative Adversarial Network that has been trained in thousands of images of Greek and Roman statuary worked for weeks to create its own. Rosenbaum then explored the output to find the truth inside the computer generated work and reveal that to the viewer. Another Neural Network looked at the works and wrote poetry based on what it saw through an image classifier. This is incorporated into a soundscape inside the app. Viewers will see light boxes and watch them come to life inside the app as the computer generated work is transformed and reinterpreted by human eyes and hands. The language is alien, computer driven showing a collaborative effort between human and machine. This highly experimental work invites questions about computers creating art, about how machines see humans and gender and idealized beauty.

BoK2019 will generate questions that explore the dynamic between an organism and its surroundings, by asking: How does art shift the way knowledge and thinking processes are acquired, extended and distributed? How do cognitive theories offer ways to enact and change individual and collective ways of thinking? The aims of the first Body of Knowledge Art and Embodied Cognition Conference, which was held at UC IRVINE in 2016 were to “bring together an interdisciplinary group including cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, philosophers of mind, physiologists, psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, computer scientists, artists and designers to explore emerging cognitive neuroscience and theories of embodied cognition.”