September 7 – 11, 2022
Ars Electronica is the center for experimentation in art, science and technology that just this year celebrates its first 25 years. A cutting-edge institution capable of attracting not only artists but also engineers, scientists, tech companies, as well as universities and research institutes from all over the world, through its hybrid nature of a cultural laboratory, festival, award, platform and network.
With research ranging from virtual reality immersion to robot interaction, from swarm behavior in the air to creative artificial intelligence, Ars Electronica embodies our ideal ecosystem, that Planet B which is the only possible innovation if we are to avoid “ecological super disaster”-as the concept chosen for this year’s edition tells.
We have already explored the blog and poked around the program to preview the projects we will see on display and the talks, workshops, and performances to attend.
And at Ars Electronica we are bringing And We Thought, the work born from the collaboration between Roberto Fassone, AI LAI and Andrea Zaninello, as part of the FOOD DATA DIGESTION project. And We Thought is a creative artificial intelligence that arises from the introduction of the unexpected into machine learning: the machine’s creativity not only helps the human empathize and collaborate with it, but also opens up new scenarios in the use of ia for predicting the future:
We can only predict the future based on our experience or known facts from the past. Predicting “a future” is also one of the core concepts of generative AI systems in the field of text and music generation. What future means in this context is simply the prediction of the next possible element, considering all previous elements in a document or a piece of music. It is also based on the past, existing content and what has been learned during the AI training. A well-trained AI system should be able to handle new situations or conditions that the music or text may be involved in and continue to do so in a satisfactory manner. Similarly, in real life and especially in today’s global and dynamic world, we cannot predict the future by relying only on the past. This is where creativity is needed. Creativity helps us predict not just one future, but many versions of that future. It is still based on the facts of the past, but it gives us a certain plasticity to think and react to different possible developments
