Abstract
This chapter looks at artists’ experimentations with linkages between intelligent computational systems and non-human living organisms. These unusual hybrid systems showcase models for how we can bridge heterogeneous lifeworlds. In doing so, they evince all kinds of heretofore unimagined possibilities for mutual understanding and influence, which may give us new perspectives on AI-non-human alterities and may serve to question the anthropocentric divisions between humans, human technology and the more than human world. At the same time, this approach may point toward a model of art-making, where encounters between living organisms and intelligent machines can serve not only as vectors of novelty and unexpected variety, but also as a step toward developing a system of ideas focused on showcasing alternative possibilities of human–machine non-human relations.
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Notes
- 1.
Pask spoke of “rewarding” the system if it generated desired outputs. This is not reward in the Pavlovian sense or in the sense used in reinforcement learning applications in computer science where a response is rewarded so as to obtain more of that specific response in the future. Rather, it is reward in the sense Pask described: to give “permission” for the system to continue to develop its thread structures, but develop them in an unspecified way. A kind of adaptive steering. This reward usually entails sending more current to the solution. See (Pask 1959), Pask (1960).
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Castellanos, C. (2022). Intersections of Living and Machine Agencies: Possibilities for Creative AI. In: Vear, C., Poltronieri, F. (eds) The Language of Creative AI. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10960-7_9
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