#12 Rainy days and A.I. Anne
Rainy Days and A.I. Anne
I went to a conference in Manchester, Storytelling + Machines, last week. It was so cold that all the Europeans were wearing their down jackets. The British summer is often considerably cooler than the Australian winter. I blame the weather apps.
Anyway, this very interesting conference included a fabulous keynote from an American artist called Janet Biggs who has worked at the intersection of art, science and technology for many years. One of her projects, A.I. Anne, was created as a way of reckoning with the memory of her non-verbal autistic Aunt Anne. Institutionalised in Vermont at the age of 5, Anne emerged from the institution decades later and went to live with Janet. Long after Anne died Janet created this beguiling performance project with musicians and a sound artist using generative AI. Janet writes:
A.I. Anne is a machine learning entity created by Richard Savery. Trained on Mary’s voice, A.I. Anne is named and patterned after my aunt, who was severely autistic and nonverbal due to apraxia. The “human” Anne could emotively hum, but was never able to speak. The virtual A.I. Anne has the ability to vocalize, but not create language. Using deep learning combined with semantic knowledge, A.I. Anne can generate audible emotions and respond to emotions.
A.I. Anne has many parallels with one of the projects we’ve invested in through our UKRI-funded project, MyWorld. Inside is a VR and haptics project created by theatre maker Sacha Wares, based on the life of outsider artist Judith Scott who, like Janet’s Aunt Anne, was institutionalised by her family at a young age. Both of these artists are using technology as a way of carefully thinking through how non-verbal and autistic women might have experienced the world. Compelling and thought-provoking.
Janet also spent time living in the Mars simulation project in the Utah desert and opened her talk with a vivid description of what it is like to inhabit a spacesuit which I can now add to my list of things I don’t want to do. My glasses would fog up immediately and Mars would be nothing but a red blur to me.
I’ve been away, travelling a bit, on a yoga retreat, as well as down at Dent’s Glove Factory in Wiltshire in order to watch MyWorld Fellow Gabby Shiner-Hill work with a team from Uni of Bath’s CAMERA unit to digitise an Alexander McQueen dress. You can read about her Fellowship here.
I’ve been reading, as always, and can recommend Hisham Matar’s novel, My Friends, which is a about a young Libyan man who is caught up in the violence when armed men opened fire on a small crowd of protestors outside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984, killing PC Yvonne Fletcher. The book unfolds over several decades and is a beautifully written story about exile, Libya, and London.
I’m very excited about the new Government.
Stay warm, if you’re in Britain, stay cool if you are just about anywhere else.
Yours, Kate
PS If anyone knows how to make images stay centred on Buttondown, let me know.