<aside> 🗣️ There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns. — Octavia E. Butler

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01_ Context

<aside> 🐌 2024 / ONGOING

Slow AI: Seeding alternative AI narratives

Inspired by the counter-movements of slow fashion and slow food, this project will investigate three emerging AI counter-narratives –Small AI 🐜, Ancestral AI 🐚, and Esoteric AI 🔮 – and explore what it might look like to incorporate them in our everyday practice. We will interrogate and publish critical AI discourse in a format that makes sense to us and our practices, namely zines and creative technology installations, and at project end we will publish an anthology – a hot compost pile of miro boards, zines, and art that we hope sparks new ways to think and talk about AI.

URL: Public Project Page + Miro Board

TIME: 01 - 10/2024

TEAM: Nadia Piet (Research + Creative Lead), Ploipailin Flynn (Project Lead), Dominika Čupková (Comms Lead), Nadia Nadesan (Research Lead, Small AI), Natalia Stanusch (Research Lead, Esoteric AI), Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes (Research Lead, Ancestral AI), Internet Teapot (zine partner)

FUNDING: Stimuleringsfonds Creative Industries + currently looking for additional co-funding

Collage made with “Scrap Narratives Tool” by Marina Cardoso for Slow AI project

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02_ Artist brief

AIxDESIGN will commission 3 artists to bring to life key findings and questions from our ongoing Slow AI research. One artist will be commissioned per Slow AI theme 👇

🎉 What we’re looking for

The objective of this commission is to translate the key concepts from Slow AI into an artwork piece that helps people ‘get’ key concepts from the research without having to labor over the research ‘report’. This artwork can serves as a commentary or build on specific Slow AI concepts.

• Open to any mediums / formats. Here’s a long-list:
  • story-telling in interesting formats: time-based media like non-linear story-telling, games, audio walk, virtual worlds, site-specific, virtual, data storytelling, visual essays, experimental publishing
  • social performance: rituals, workshop formats, meditations, collective, individual
  • creative technology: open-source tool, a UI for a code-heavy tool; hardware + software, interactive website
  • something that fits into neither or goes across these categories
• Bonus points for: interactive / experiential / participatory - something people can do, try, experiment with, experience
• Outputs that help people think or learn or feel - provoke something 🙂
• Publishable to web. Please note, your output doesn’t have to be web-first, we just want it to be easily referencable online.
  • e.g. if a site-specific installation, a virtual version and/or detailed photo / video documentation
  • e.g. a custom device, open-source code, video tutorials etc.

❌ What we’re not looking for

• Purely aesthetic outputs
• Work too difficult to understand for people outside the field / requiring deep knowledge or lots of reading

The 3 themes

02.a_ Small AI [Public]

<aside> 🐜 TLDR: Small AI questions the dominance of large-scale models by addressing environmental impact, discriminatory language, and cultural preservation. It’s an invitation to use notions of fractals, friction, and fragmented-ness in nature and math to inspire ideas around Small AI and send ripples that shift practices around Big AI. It advocates for equitable, sustainable alternatives, prompting exploration of community-focused governance, and interconnectedness as pathways to more just futures.

In this research we ask: What is possible when our objective is cultural creation and preservation instead of scale or profit?

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