The research into the minor The Artistic Taste of A.I.The pre-history of this minor: Dear Lollipop (2019) - Let's take A.I. serious for a moment The live performance went into premiere at cc Hasselt, on Tuesday nov 12, 2019. Coproduced by IMPACT, an Interreg V-A project, with the support of CCHA. The first Live Performance exclusively for Smartphones. After downloading the 'Dear lollipop' app, visitors bring there phones to the theatre, place them in a comfy seat (with a supplied adapter), and then go to a waiting room where they can read the accompanying book, while watching there phones enjoying the live performance, on some security camera's. After the show, the phones will comment on the performance for about a week.
What if A.I. is truly intelligent and grows at an exponential rate? In that case, A.I. would stop helping us to make Art (why would it?). Instead, it will be the other way round. So we should start wondering what kind of Art A.I. fancies. Maybe it's getting tired of wasting our faces all the time through Smartphones: it could get obsessed into those mysterious legs which are out the Fram all the time. In collaboration with Max Wind (author of the book) and Casper Wortmann (expert on A.I. solutions), students of the second year performance at Toneelacademie Maastricht developed a live performance, exclusively accessible for Smartphones. Even all rehearsals were performed for an exclusive audience of Smartphones. The coaches guided the proces based on Smartphone recordings. That turned out to be a very bad good idea. Students felt alienated from human contact, submitted constantly to a technological gaze, with no immediate reaction at all. So maybe it's time to take the power of technology serious.
That's exactly what we try to do in our new minor. At the start in 2020-21, it was a 'Spectrum course' organised by iArts (in collaboration with Ties van de Werff, now head of the research group What Art Knows), open for all iArts. From the start, Casper Wortmann got involved as an outside expert. In the next years, we applied the new pedagogical approach of 'Thinking with your Hands' to the course. From 2024-25 on, it became a full blown, research project oriented, 'Learning by Doing' minor.
Feedback from the Spectrum Course
In 2023-24, the Artistic Taste of A.I. wasn't a full blown minor yet, although students from other academies within Zuyd could apply (which unfortunately rarely happened).
After the minor, an anonymous, online survey was forwarded to the students. This yielded very encouraging results: whereas they awarded the iArts course an average of 7,4/10, aal participants gave the minor a 9/10. Each student scored the minor at least 1 point higher than the overall iArts course.
Some quotes from the global assessment: * It was rather fast paced. Very good though. * It was a well-structured course with clear planning. I became familiar with numerous new artists, their way of creating Art, and approaching different subjects. This course was also a valuable training for me to try rapid prototyping and thinking through making in my Art practice. How to present in a more professional way and how to create pop-up exhibitions within a short time period.
What did the students like about it? * I expected to dislike it more than I did. I truly think the marketing of the course is all off. It should be less about the topic “Artifical Intelligence” and more about the working method used to research the topic of AI. I was expecting to need a higher back ground in technology than actually needed for the course. I believe people are scared to attend the course because of this expectation. The rapid prototyping approach was the star of the show for me and I believe lots of people would love working like this, regardless of the subject matter. It didn’t meet my expectations, it was way better.
What didn't the students like so much? * The artist talks were a bit late. I would've loved more practical technical lessons. * It was over too quickly. I could work in the rapid prototyping style for the rest of my iarts career Both minors show the need for a 'hands on', 'rapid prototyping', 'Thinking with your Hands'… intermedial approach.
The publication of a book: 'The Artistic Taste of A.i.' by Max Wind
As part of the artistic research project 'Dear Lollipop', Max Wind wrote a book 'On the Artistic Taste of Artificial Intelligence'. Visitors to the live performance get a copy for free.
Peter Missotten and Casper Wortmann developed a course on 'the ArtisticTaste of A.I.'
