#7 Jan Løhmann Stephensen: Post-Creativity – After the Reign of the Meat Robot

12.00–17.00 @Høegh Guldbergs Gade 65B, 8000 Aarhus C, DK
The workshop is in english—and it's free of charge. Max. workshop participants: 8
Bring your own laptop + power supply

If there’s one thing that stands out across all the different notions of creativity out there, it’s how we’ve come to invent creativity in a form that is quintessentially human. This, for instance, becomes obvious when we listen in on the ways we currently talk about the possibilities of (general) artificial intelligence, automation and robotics. Here, creativity is highlighted as Man’s last resort, that which the machines won’t be able to do unassisted, autonomously. But maybe this assumption is not quite true? Maybe the good ol’ meat machine isn’t the only inventive machine in town. At this workshop, we will look at, experiment with, and discuss which ideas of creativity are already embedded in our machinic environment, and which new conceptions of creativity might be appropriate looking ahead.

The practical part of the workshop introduces ways to think about and work with machine learning and artificial intelligence in relation to artistic production and design processes. It gives an overview of various apps and wrappers for AI and ML, that have emerged in recent years – and teaches workshop participants how to work with Wekinator, a software app for real-time, interactive machine learning. http://www.wekinator.org

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Bio: Jan Løhmann Stephensen is Assistant Professor at Aesthetics & Culture, Aarhus University. For what seems like ages, he has written on creativity from a socio-economic and political perspective, now he’s pursuing a project on ‘post-anthropocentric creativity’.