STUDIOTOPIA RESIDENCIES
Feeding the Algorithm
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by: Maja Smrekar, artist in residence in collaboration with scientist Jonas Jørgensen 27.04.2021 |
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Artist Maja Smrekar writes about the most recent chapter of her ongoing artistic research project !brute_force, which she is currently further developing in collaboration with scientist Jonas Jørgensen as part of STUDIOTOPIA Art&Science Programme hosted by Ars Electronica.
During the past year, everyone has been struggling with understanding the coordinates of a new actuality, especially in regard to the social and personal paradoxes revealed by the corona era. Recalling the second half of March 2020, when we ordered the materials to build the installation, I was trembling: would they arrive (on time)? - while simultaneously keeping my fingers crossed that all the colleagues involved would be able to continue their participation in the project. Despite some logistical problems, it all turned out well and we managed to build the installation until mid-May, only going about a month over schedule. For the next two and a half months, the installation has been built and set up at a studio facility of the RPS company in Ljubljana, serving us as a polygon for feeding the algorithm.
The gloomy pandemic atmosphere evoked a new perspective on reality, merging our bodies with a digital realm to an unbelievable extent and with tremendous speed. This strengthened in me the need to keep establishing my own radical body, and so I started practicing yoga inspired fitness, that would later prove to be a solid basis for my endurance during the performances. Furthermore, by addressing the hegemonic structure of technology as a means to interrogate the moment of the COVID pandemic, I departed from the fact that digital technicity in the service of political power and social control stems from the hierarchical categorization of natural beings and bodies. On the one hand, the !brute_force project represented the canine and human bodies as reduced abstractions within total corporate knowledge and control of bodily functions. But on the other hand, the project suggested possible paths of resistance, by imagining the human-with-animal-with-technology coexistence in a state of joint physical activity, while the latter opened further questions such as: To what extent is the ownership of the body and the self possible through augmented reality and the principles of uncertainty? How much potential is there in data science for experimentation with subjectivity? Does the realm of abstract data allow the possibility for hybrid identities?
An orthogonally abstracted serotonin molecule-shaped grid genesis; design: Aljaž Vesel, Anja Delbello
ITERATIONS
The installation resembled an orthogonally abstracted serotonin molecule-shaped grid as a stage for analysing processes of breathing, body temperature and heartbeat as quintessential medical parameters of the bodily activity that identify the COVID-19 viral infection. However, all these parameters in our body are also regulated by the effects of serotonin – the human neurotransmitter whose metabolic functions have been highly influenced by the parallel evolution with dogs. The grid served as a platform for feeding our algorithm by executing numerous iterations. During the iterations, the dog and I climbed through a shape composed of plates and empty spaces. Throughout my climbs, I built new combinations of 32 plates and 67 empty spaces as input for the neural network, and at the same time as stairs for the dog to follow. What I actually did from the perspective of our convolutional neural network, was composing pixels in the form of plates on the recommendation of the network output, based on the parameters of physiology of me and the dog, since we both wore electrocardiograph diagnostic wearables, that measure our heart rate, respiratory rate and skin temperature. That data gathered real time in the cloud to be classified as the output. And while both the dog and I invested our bodily forces during all the iterations, it was the dog’s moving body that evoked the sense of agency within the grid, since it was to the dog’s physiological rhythm that I was made to adapt throughout this whole action. The whole process made me realize that through the embodiment of data, the dog becomes the quintessential translator of “feelings” between technology and humanity.
Continue reading at the !brute_force website. Read more about Maja Smrekar and Jonas Jørgensen.
"Feeding the Algorithm" hosted by Ars Electronica is part of the STUDIOTOPIA project supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
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