12.03.2022
14:00-17:00 CET
Online / Etherpad
Registration Link HERE

How would you like an artificial reader to read? What kind of memory is preserved in an algorithm? What knowledge, thoughts, feelings would you want to be a part of such processes, and what previous ‘machine learnings’ could be refused?

In this workshop we will explore the potentials of hybrid algorithmic and collective reading through inventive practices of annotation. Starting from the written and spoken words of the artificial broadcaster in >>In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit<< – we will investigate how to understand and digest text generated by machine learning algorithms, and how such artificial writing can be read next to and together with new text of our own choosing. 

Everyone attending the workshop will be asked to bring a piece of writing that has influenced the way they think about prediction, lineage and thinking towards the long future, or simply a piece of writing that they wish to better understand. Then together we will explore collective methods for reading “annotatively” that can then become possible strategies for guiding artificial voices.

The workshop will be led by artists from Varia, a collective infrastructure who have been developing experimental approaches for reading and annotation. Annotating texts as we read is a practice shared by many, we highlight, underline, write in the margin, look up words, take notes, in order to make a text more accessible. Annotation also potentially becomes a corrective method for interpreting past texts, so that they might be more valuable within a present context, or, in the case of a deep learning system – such as those that generate artificial words and voices – annotation can be used as a collective approach for shepherding words and meaning – as we intervene by undoing, relearning and rewriting. 

Varia (NL) is a Rotterdam based initiative focused on working with, on and through everyday technology. At its core the initiative aims to be a social infrastructure from which to collaboratively facilitate critical understandings on the technologies that surround us. The initiative is a membership-based organisation striving to become a space for questions, opinions, modifications, help and action. http://varia.zone/

>>In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit<< is a year-long experiment in generative radio by Jonathan Chaim Reus. An artificial BroadCaster, a bespoke voice synthesis system utilizing current deep learning techniques in voice synthesis and style transfer, shifts through speech and song, words and soundscapes, reading through text as if tracing slowly over the letters, probing them and unsettling them. Through the year the BroadCaster performs words produced by predictive processes, beginning with a small set of texts, including virologist Jonas Salk’s 1977 speech “Are we being Good Ancestors?”, and growing its knowledge throughout the year by a series of public workshops. 

The BroadCaster tries to predict what words should come next at any given time based on its previous and current memory. Ideas of long-term thinking, wrapped up in human activities of prediction, risk analysis, and adaptation happen at many levels of society and individual consciousnesses. What does it mean to be a “good ancestor”? And what kind of cultural memories will be left within the algorithmic, AI-entangled writing systems of today? The work can be streamed yearlong via ahnen.in

Workshops Supported By

>>In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit<< is commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur, CTM Festival, and ORF Ö1 Kunstradio.

The workshop series around this work is supported by CTM Festival, Sussex Humanities Lab and Platform for Thought in Motion (The Reading Room).