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The European Digital Deal project
The call for artists launched on Sept. 28 and open until Nov. 30, 2023, is part of the European Digital Deal project, the initiative co-funded by the Creative Europe program and led by Ars Electronica, of which Sineglossa is the only Italian partner. 14 European cultural organizations together to investigate how the rapid and sometimes naïve adoption of new artificial intelligence technologies can contribute to altering or undermining democratic processes. Through an international call for artists, European Digital Deal will select 12 projects for artistic residencies in the cultural centers involved, where artists will create interactive installations to expose the risks and opportunities related to the use of artificial intelligence in the daily lives of European citizens.
As the first step of the European Digital Deal project, each partner brought together a group of experts – for Sineglossa we involved representatives from the field of artificial intelligence to contemporary art, from debunking to research on technology and society (Wu Ming 2, Luca Baraldi, Ilaria Bonacossa, Sara Tonelli, Barbara Busi) – with a double role: support in defining the challenge to be issued to artists through the open call and support for the artists in residence in their research and project development. Some of these experts – for Sineglossa Luca Baraldi, Head of Human Sciences at Ammagamma – met at the Ars Electronica Festival for the Digital Deal Summit, a series of workshops on disinformation, digital rights and climate justice, digital inclusivity and web accessibility, public open data, and citizen participation. The thoughts that emerged during the three-day summit can help artists develop projects to apply to the open call. The Summit’s closing event is available here.
The Call for Artists
The call is open to individual artists and collectives interested in exploring a wide range of topics. These include the concept of truth in the information age shaped by algorithms, biases in AI, techno-anxiety, digital divides resulting from digitization and strategies to address them, new forms of surveillance, intelligence, life, citizenship, or work. A detailed description of the challenges defined for each residency is available on the project website.
The Sineglossa challenge
“The Enchantment of Truth” is the title of the challenge defined by Sineglossa and the group of experts involved in the initial months of the project.
With the advent of the Internet, conspiracy fantasies have spread pervasively throughout the world. The rise of generative AI, which enables the rapid and massive production of plausible multimedia content, threatens to explode this phenomenon. Conspirators spreading fake news are not interested in reports and numbers, considering these data as part of the system that conceals the plot. Also, scientific papers and robust proofs are usually not fascinating: research has shown that humans are more willing to believe and disseminate information if it is an emotionally captivating new story. People, not only plotters, are interested in content that creates enchantment. To explore the theme of disinformation and the role that artists can play in addressing it, you can refer to the insights gained during the first meeting of the Local Expert Group convened by Sineglossa: “Debunking requires art”.
This challenge aims to produce an artwork that addresses this issue to open meaningful discussions and scenarios on the age of posttruth, its consequences for our democratic values, and/or the design of systems that can expose and react to these risks. We encourage artists working in any media to submit a project that challenges misinformation and disinformation – through AI, but also about AI itself – with reliable data, wonder and stories. The use of generative AI – text, image, video, music, etc. – in the artwork will be an element of preference, as will the description of the used datasets.
The Sineglossa residency
The residency will take place between May and December 2024 at the Tecnopolo Manifattura | Data Valley Hub in Bologna (Italy), home to some of the most powerful High -Performance Computers in the world, and international reference for Supercomputing, Big Data and AI. In addition to the expected fee, the artist will receive 10,000€ in kind from the partner Cineca Visit Lab as follows: 8,000€ for data scientists and computer scientists’ skills; 2,000€ for hardware, software and servers.
The partner FBK will provide its in-depth knowledge of text analysis (50 hours of support) and generation tools:
- Tint NLP suite for the advanced analysis of Italian texts;
- access to large language models, in particular, generative models like GPT2, ChatGPT and
similar; - multilingual models like T5 and support finetuning them and generating texts in multiple languages.
Moreover, the artist will receive:
- mentoring from our expert group, gathering experts in data ethics, data-driven art and graphics, debunking, NLP,
- support from the Human Technology Lab Group of the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Bolzano (designers, psychologists, philosophers and computer scientists),
- support from Sineglossa.
By the end of the residency, the artist will have to produce an artwork which will be displayed in a temporary exhibition at the Technopole.
How to partecipate
The call for artists offers a grant of EUR 25,000 per residency, which will last for 9 months from April to December 2024. Both individual artists and duos or collectives are eligible to apply. A total of 12 residencies are available, and applicants can propose three different projects for three different challenges, choosing from those published by the project partner network (the list of challenges is available here). The Guide for Applicants provides detailed information on eligibility criteria, project scope and objectives, application and evaluation procedures, application form requirements, and where to apply.
