Art and Tech Summit
BOM
I spent Friday and Saturday this weekend at BOM, Birmingham Open Media, in Dudley Street, Birmingham attending the Art and Tech Summit. There was a variety of workshops and talks, many exploring the themes of artificial intelligence and virtual reality uses in art.
Friday night
On the Friday night I attended the BOM gallery in Birmingham to hear about the work BOM has been doing in Indonesia, and to listen to Jameela Khan talks about her residency there with Lifepatch. It was interesting to hear how she used gaming to teach sex education in rural Indonesia and the types of games she created to do this.
Saturday
AI and art
Luba Elliott, a curator, artist and researcher specialising in artificial intelligence in the creative industries talked about how artists are currently using AI, she shared fascinating images of some of the work being created in this field from artists such as Sofia Crespo, Mario Klingemann and Roman Lipski. The Predictive Art Bot was also discussed, I liked the concept of an algorithm that turns media headlines into artistic concepts and I've spent a fair bit of time on the website reading its latest creations -slightly addictive!
Citizen science
Citizen science was a discussion on data collection and classification lead by Dr Will Hartley and artist Amy Haigh. The talk explored how the public are helping with the classification of images, and looking at a range of projects on Zooniverse.org from classifying penguins on Penguin Watch to ladybirds . We then looked at the classification of galaxies, we had a little go at classifying galaxies too, but I wasn't very good at that!
VR Pitch
Katie Day, a theatre maker and BOM Fellow, talked about immersive experiences in theatre and VR. I created with the help of a fellow summit attendee a VR film pitch, we used a game of Consequence to create our pitch with some very unusual results, which you can see below.
Swoomp Wurld
After lunch I had the opportunity of using some VR kit as Ben Neal from Psicon Lab talked about his collaboration with Swoomptheeng a Birmingham-based audio-visual collective, and how he went about creating their VR Swoomp Wurld using 3D scanning and motion capture. I also got some really useful information about VR Headsets, the Unity games engine, and software.
It was great to spend time with other practitioners discussing artificial intelligence and virtual reality uses in art, and I look forward to my next visit to BOM. If you can make it to Birmingham, UK, I recommend visiting BOM and seeing their exhibits Beholder a virtual reality experience by United Visual Artists, and THE KITTY AI by Pinar Yoldas.
You can find my crypto art on SuperRare. Limited-edition collectible art works cryptographically registered with a token on the Ethereum blockchain.
@opheliafu when judging by the shared material this was very interesting, congratulations for attending this event.
Thank you very much for letting us know all this information
I wish you a prosperous week, full of peace and happiness
Thank you @jlufer, it was a very informative event to attend, plus it was great to see the range of work being created.