EUNIC AI Science Café Series: AI & Art

The brand new EUNIC AI Science Café Series aims to present current and timely topics alongside the proposals for innovative, bold and inspirational solutions to tackle key issues. The contributors are experts from the EUNIC member states, many of whom represent international teams and their counterparts from the United Kingdom.

Machines can now compose an original music piece, draw an original painting, write an original piece of poetry. Is AI going to be a threat or a collaborator to people working in the creative fields? What are current and future trends?The talk invites you to learn more about the impact of AI on our creativity and art with artists and AI experts Marie du Chastelfrom KIKK Belgium,Mario Klingemannfrom Germany andJana Horáková from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. The virtual event will be chaired by Melanie Lenz, curator of Digital Art at the V&A Museum.The AI Science Cafe is organized in collaboration with the WBI, Goethe Institute and the Czech Centre.

Meet the speakers:

Melanie Lenz

Melanie Lenz is the curator of Digital Art at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where she co-curatedChance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers(2018), convened the symposium Art, Design and New Technologies for Health (2015) and curatedTransformations: Digital Printsfrom the V&A (2012). She has published papers onEarly Argentine Computer Art(2018);Women, Art & Technology(2014) andCollecting and Conserving Born Digital Art(2011). She is a guest lecturer at the Royal College of Arts, London and has broadcast widely on creative arts and advanced technologies. She is a juror for the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize for New Media and the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology.

Marie du Chastel

Marie du Chastel is an art curator and expert in digital and new media art. She is in charge of the programming of the activities of the KIKK non-profit association, which explores the crossovers between art, science, technology and society through the organisation of events and the development of educational and artistic programmes.

She is the curator of the KIKK festival, the international festival of digital and creative cultures that brings together more than 35,000 people every year in Namur, Belgium, since 2011. In parallel, she is developing the AfriKIKK project, a project to showcase the digital creativity of Africa, Maghreb countries and their diasporas. Marie is also the curator of Le Pavillon, the new permanent exhibition space by KIKK which brings together artistic works, scientific research projects and prototypes from the business world.

She is also in charge of the KIKK’s artistic production and dissemination platform, which produces artists, organises residencies and disseminates their productions throughout the world. Finally, she participates in the organisation’s many other projects, including the creative hub and Fab Lab in Namur TRAKK.

Marie has been a member of the Digital Arts Commission of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation since 2014. At the end of 2020, she was elected Francophone Woman of the Year 2020 by the AIMF (the International Association of Francophone Mayors). 

Jana Horáková

Jana is the head of Theory of Interactive Media (MA) study programme and of Digital Culture and Creative Industries (Ph.D.) study programme at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University. She conducted research into robots and robotic art history and theory. She has been testing IT driven methods of research into new media art. Together with her student, she created a virtual reconstruction of a computer-generated graphics exhibition (Computer Graphic, 1968, Brno House of Arts), using virtual reality, namely 3D modeling and game engine. Recently, Jana and her team have been investigating AI (machine learning) as a research tool into electronic art history and poetics (Vasulka Live Archive) and as an alien curator of human traces of the Covid-19 pandemic (Black Box, online exhibition). Both projects were presented at the Ars Electronica Festival: Vasulka Live Archive (2019) and Black Box (2020).

Mario Klingemann 

A pioneer in the field of neural networks, computer learning and artificial intelligence, German artist Mario Klingemann uses cutting edge techniques to examine age-old questions about creativity, culture and perception.

Klingemann currently lives in Munich, Germany, where he also runs a space called Dog & Pony. He is an Artist in Residence at Google Arts & Culture, and also works with institutions like the British Library, Cardiff University and the New York Public Library. His works have been shown at the Ars Electronica Festival, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others. In 2016, Klingemann received the British Library Labs Artistic Award, and in 2018 he won the Lumen Prize Gold, which recognizes works of art made using technology. In 2019, his largest project to date, Circuit Training, was installed at the Barbican’s AI: More Than Human exhibition in London.