The original technologists & teaching our machines

I found day 2 to be a day full of insights into the original technologists during Hasan’s talk – From Clock to Clock Maker. I didn’t realise that the idea of a robot came from a play and to be honest, I never look at clocks and think mechanical, machines, AI etc. I’ve started to notice more objects in my home that are artificial intelligence and how the history and context of this technology also has many stories unknown to artists and the public, even though we use our gadgets day in, day out.

Hasan presenting his talk – From Clock to Clock Maker

Alistair also came up with an amazing name to replace the term Artificial Intelligence, to Alternative Intelligence.

Another question we asked ourselves were “What are we trying to sustain?” As robots and machines were and still are designed to serve us humans, to undertake forced labour and to entertain us.

As I have been using technology in my work for three years now, I believe that reading more about the history, will inform the tools I choose to use, as like I said earlier, every tool/object tells it’s own story.

Which leads me nicely onto our exercise in small groups, where we gathered objects from our home / studio around us, that represented the colours, themes, textures and atmospheres of our poems written on day 1.

My household objects were silver, purple, shiny, reflective and fluid.

Yoga mat, water, mirror, mouthwash, solder cleaner, cap of a lava lamp and candle wax.

Hasan taught us how to use a machine learning and coding software – Teachable Machine and P5. We taught our machines to recognise our objects and to link them with certain lines of our poems. I collaborated with Jo and Marcel, which was lots of fun.

Training my machine to recognise household objects that represent the sentences in my poem, using a browser-based machine learning software – Teachable Machine.

Our group showing each other our trained machines, after we uploaded the code for our machines to P5…. it worked nicely!

I found both softwares to be very intuitive and less daunting than I initially thought they would be. I would like to have another play with this!

This session followed yet another set of inspiring Pecha Kucha presentations, again – my mind was blown and I needed time to digest it all at the end of the day. So much talent in the room!