A UNIQUE Edinburgh-based hub linking creativity and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to present ground-breaking work at the world’s leading festival for arts, technology and society.
The New Real, a partnership between the University of Edinburgh, The Alan Turing Institute and Edinburgh’s Festivals, has been given a high-profile platform at the forthcoming Ars Electronica Festival in Austria.
Designed by leading Scottish designer Andy McGregor, the New Real pavilion will showcase The New Real Observatory in the Ars Electronica Garden in Linz.
The New Real Observatory is a creative AI platform combining raw satellite data and climate modelling with AI processing engines, co-created by scientists and artists.
“I am thrilled that The New Real, a project initiated in Edinburgh and developed in collaboration with Edinburgh’s Festivals and leading technology partners, is truly breaking new ground in this exciting area of AI arts, having found a high-profile platform in Ars Electronica,” said Dr Drew Hemment, project director and principal investigator of The New Real, who conceived and leads the project.
“At The New Real, we discovered new horizons for digital arts during the dark times of Covid-19 and with creative content being increasingly digital and AI enabling new forms of production and dissemination that were unthinkable only a few years ago, astonishing possibilities are opening up thanks to these tools.”
The New Real Observatory platform is designed to integrate data stream and forecasting pipelines for selected climate features, combined with AI processing engines to manipulate images, words, sounds and numbers using the climate data and forecasts as the exploratory parameters.
This enables the artists to expose the operation of a machine learning algorithm and explore the link between global-scale data and what is called “ground truth” or reality.
The purpose of the project is to create an accessible, usable, low-energy AI tool for artists who are not themselves AI practitioners.
It also aims to test strategies to make AI legible and enable artists to connect global climate data to people’s lives through narrative and interaction.
Three artworks have been developed through the platform as well as an interactive pop-up research hub.
The pieces investigate the entanglement of people, data, machines and environments.
