Sign up for workshops here:
Collective World-Building Workshop
Daniel Lichtman
Thursday, Oct. 6, 3:00 – 5:00pm
Friday, Oct. 7, 3:00 – 5:00pm
Location: Pao B179
This workshop is limited to 15 participants
Collaborative work resulting from the Collective World-Building Workshop will premiere in the SLSA Art Gallery (Rueff Galleries, Pao Hall) on October 8/9
In this workshop, participants will work together to produce an interactive, virtual 3D environment composed of audio recordings and photographic fragments of participants’ immediate, physical surroundings. Over the course of the workshop, participants will capture audio and photographic source material and work together to compose this material into a 3D scene using Lichtman’s Community Game Development Toolkit. The resulting work charts a network of chance encounters with disembodied audio-visual fragments of participants’ surroundings, representing a unique, virtual composition of participants’ collective experience of space, material and sound.
Important: Attendance at both sessions of the workshop on Thursday and Friday is encouraged but not required. Participants may choose to sign up for one workshop session only.
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Inverted Machine Learning with Marching Cubes: an Art-Making Workshop
Jesse Colin Jackson
Friday, Oct. 7, 10:00am – 12:00pm (noon)
Location: Rueff Galleries, Pao Hall
This workshop is limited to 20 participants
In 1987, researchers at General Electric pioneered a method for generating computer graphics from medical scan data that featured an underlying language of faceted cubes. I wanted to make this seminal computational procedure — now known as Marching Cubes — into something people could build with. I translated the algorithm into 3D printed construction units that permit people to act out its logic. Each assembly is unique, and created collaboratively: together, we perform the computer’s process. We also perform the fabrication process: in aggregating the units, layer by layer, we mimic the 3D printer that made them. Sometimes, we simply play: with humans doing the work, strict procedural logic is optional. Taken together, these evolutionary behaviors constitute an inverted form of machine learning, where a human collective interprets and improves a computational method, expanding the possible results towards more creative and meaningful ends.
In this workshop, we’ll explore and enact these behaviors and, working together, create an assembly that is unique to SLSA 2022’s opportunities and constraints. This co-created artwork will then be reinstalled in the gallery for the remainder of the exhibition. Attendance at my associated paper presentation (Thursday 3:00-4:30 pm) is recommended but not (at all) required.
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Terms of Service Fantasy Reader Workshop
Darija Medić
Saturday, Oct. 8, 10:00am – 12:00pm (noon)
Location: THTR Sound Studio, Pao Hall (room number TBD)
This workshop is limited to 15 participants
Join the Terms of Service Fantasy Reader workshop for a collective vocalization of soft (de)codification. Terms of Service Fantasy Reader is a devoted space to allow the “luxury” of time to collectively read through multiple Terms of Service agreements of various commonly used apps, bring forth discussions that get raised and extract the most particular parts of the texts. In this instance we will focus on providing counter-terms, usership community guidelines and responses, expanding towards terms, gestures and voicing that could be of service to those who are commonly called end users. We will perform and record audio, so join us with your vocal and sonic agency (LaBelle-ianly)!
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AI Radio Play
Ash Eliza Smith, Jinku Kim, Robert Twomey
Friday, Oct. 7, 1:00 – 3:00pm
Saturday, Oct. 8, 1:00 – 3:00pm
Location: TBD
This workshop is limited to 20 participants
Live Public Performance of the AI Radio Play:
4:00 to 5:00pm, Saturday, October 8, 2022 in the Rueff Galleries.
Recent advancements with large language models demonstrate remarkable achievements in text synthesis, understanding, and generation. This hands-on workshop introduces state-of-the-art transformer models (GPT-3) through an interactive event culminating in a live radio play performance and internet broadcast. Participants will gain experience with collaborative worldbuilding, liveness and improv, and collective co-authorship with AI, particularly the variation induced through the unknowable contributions of improvisatory humans and large language models. SLSA 2022 is the second in a series of related workshops, resulting in the second episode in our radio play series. Learn more at: radio-play.net
Important: For a successful creation of this new AI radio play episode, participants should plan to attend both sessions of the workshop on Friday and Saturday.