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A new phase for Food Data Digestion
FOOD DATA DIGESTION, the two-year research and production project integrating art and artificial intelligence born in 2021 from a shared idea of Sineglossa with Play with food festival in Turin, and supported by Fondazione Compagnia Di San Paolo, restarts with a workshop dedicated to the creation of the first Italian-language play written by artificial intelligence and a group of artists. After the development of And we thought, the hallucinatory artificial intelligence born in June 2022 and Bolo‘s first immersive studio, which was staged in October 2022 during the 10th edition of the Play With Food festival, we will experiment in 2023 with the production of a play written by playwrights and AI, collaborating with director and author Mariano Dammacco, Ubu 2021 prize winner, and the Free University of Bolzano.
The pilot phase begins with a workshop scheduled for Feb. 13-15 at the Bolzano Campus, during which the entire working group composed of Mariano Dammacco, Prof. Antonella De Angeli, coordinator of the Human Technology Lab research group at the University of Bolzano, Federico Bomba, researcher and art director of Sineglossa, will work in presence for the first time, together with 6 playwrights – Lorenzo Bartoli, Antonio Careddu, Luca D’Arrigo, Erica Galante, Martina Michelini and Bruno Orlando, who met at the dramaturgy masterclass held by Dammacco during the 1st edition of Cantieri, the multidisciplinary high artistic training and experimentation project dedicated to the performing arts, organized in June 2022 by the Play with Food Festival together with Casa Fool – and with researchers Michele Cremaschi, Paolo Grigis, Maria Menendez Blanco, Liu Yi Yang, Prof. Rosella Gennari.
The collaboration with the Free University of Bolzano
The testing is made possible thanks to the long-term partnership between Sineglossa and the Humanities Technology Laboratory of the Faculty of Computer Science at the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, a collaboration supported by the HCI4Inclusion project, funded by the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano and PNRR funds for PhD students (DM351 and DM352).
Prof. De Angeli explains that this collaboration aims to address some questions that are growing more compelling in recent months: are artificial intelligences creative? Do they have imaginative capacity and visionary faculty? Can the artist-AI interaction bring human beings closer to the cognitive and experiential processes of machines? Can such an encounter generate new artistic forms, and if so, who becomes the author?
She also adds that in 30 years, “We moved from cognitive crafts aimed at simplifying and optimizing work performance to ever more engaging and stimulating experiences in everyday life and even to political activation and mass conditioning systems. However, these were always computer tools: objects that carried out tasks under the human being’s direct control.”
Now, the landscape has dramatically changed with the uprise of new computational actors capable of creative tasks such as writing, painting, or composing music. These AIs are characterized by strong autonomy, and good performance, but dramatic opacity so that even experienced computer scientists cannot explain the association between input and output. My laboratory approaches this revolution with a strongly interdisciplinary and ethical approach that places the human being and his fundamental rights at the center. We do not develop algorithms but study them from a humanistic perspective.
The collaboration with Mariano Dammacco
Mariano Dammacco is one of the most interesting voices in Italian dramaturgy. Author, director, and theater educator, winner of the Ubu Prize 2020-21 in the category New Italian text/dramaturgical writing for Spezzato è il cuore della bellezza, he pursues his own artistic research by focusing on the creation of performances composed of the coexistence of tragedy and humor. He was immediately fascinated and intrigued by the possibility of an intersection, comparison, and collaboration in the creative field with an intelligent machine:
I believe that the embrace of artificial intelligence can bring with it several opportunities: first of all, the opportunity for people to meet each other, among human intelligence, feelings, and skills. Also, trying to find the right way to activate artificial intelligence in a creative process gives insights into the various ways of education and communication among artists as part of a shared creative process. But most of all, that experience and field of inquiry provide us with important questions of meaning about our lives, our relationship with machines, and our future.
The match between theater and computer research was facilitated by Dr. Federico Bomba, who is the art director of Sineglossa and has also recently become a research fellow at the Human Technologies Laboratory, where he is involved in showing how co-creation between artists and machines not only works to stimulate the generation of new ideas but also opens up new paths in the human-machine relationship, helping us to humanize the futures in which we will live.
Feb. 15, how to participate
Feb. 15, 2023, h. 15 – 16
Campus Bolzano (Room F6)
Closed event with reservations required
The workshop concludes with a public presentation of the workshop results. The event will be attended by Prof. De Angeli, Dr. Federico Bomba, and the author and director Mariano Dammacco.
