Can you teach a robot how to love?
Blending Artificial Intelligence, human intuition and everything that gets lost in translation, this artwork invites you to take the perspective of another form of intelligence, to reflect on the peculiarities of our own.
Take a seat in Fast Familiar’s ‘internet cafe’ to teach a robot about romance. Part modern-day tamagotchi, part interactive fiction, Looking for Love is a playful experience that takes place over a message-based dating app. Surely training the machine on everything the internet knows about love will result in unparalleled romantic success? In your role as a wing-(hu)man, you’ll provide advice, encouragement and be that vital shoulder to cry on when things don’t work out…
Help the machine distil the essence of romance from movies, poems and song lyrics; compare your definitions of love; and determine how much of a role you want data to play in your own love life.
Looking for Love has been shown at Science Gallery London, the Science Museum and the Exchange in Birmingham, with more dates planned for the future.
The Acquisitions Panel blends fictional setting, documentary interviews and audience decision-making in an artwork about legacies of European colonialism.
The local museum has been offered an object. You, and the rest of the citizen acquisition panel, must decide whether to accept it - and how you’ll present it if you do. You’ll hear from cultural activists and museum professionals in Europe and Africa, discuss with your fellow participants, and ultimately decide what should happen.
The Acquisitions Panel received the Jury Special Mention in the Alternate Realities category at Sheffield DocFest 2022, and the Activist Museum Award. It aims to create a space where we can collectively explore the question: how do we choose the stories we tell about the past?
We’ve presented The Acquisitions Panel at festivals and arts venues in the UK and internationally. We’ve also used it within museums to kick off conversations about re-interpretation and decolonisation. We love this piece and we’d like to show it more.
The Evidence Chamber is a collaboration with the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science (LRCFS), at the University of Dundee. Audiences make up a jury who must review documents and audio and video evidence to reach a verdict on a murder case which hinges on two types of forensic evidence: gait analysis and DNA.
The audience watches ‘testimonies’ from characters involved and expert witnesses. Their decision-making process is supported by explanatory materials about forensic evidence. The experience is structured to measure the impact of these materials: the bespoke control system logs anonymised data on each juror’s decision-making process. A debrief allows audiences to deepen their understanding of forensic processes and criminal justice procedures.
The Evidence Chamber (TEC) premiered at the Sherriff Court in Dundee, with audiences in the actual jury deliberation room, and got us a 4* review in the Stage. It was later shortlisted for a Times Higher Education award, the so-called ‘Oscars of the Higher Education world’.
When COVID hit, Joe rewrote the whole syndicate system so that it could be an online experience, and we ran three weeks of sold out shows with ‘jurors’ joining us from over 20 countries, and one special VIP jury of crime writers, which was in no way intimidating. The experience was praised by the New York Times as ‘relentless innovation, a glimpse of the future of online performance’ and declared by No Proscenium to be ‘guilty of greatness’.
We now run the in-person version at crime festivals, and for forensic science and law students.
#audiencecentric #playabletheatre #immersive #forensicscience
How can we centre sustainable practices as part of an international collaboration?
With @fastfamiliarstudio , @unboxculturalfutures , @fakugesi and @artscatalyst we collectively experimented with a framework that centred sustainability, access and co-creation within digital artistic practice as part of THREE FIELDS.
As part of this collaboration, we presented a soundscape created by artists @paticheri , @casualmouldy and @samukelisiwe_siphesihle as part of @eyemythfestival in March, and will be archived online on our low carbon THREE FIELDS website.
As the project comes to a close, @fastfamiliarstudio ’s Dan Barnard, artist facilitator for THREE FIELDS, takes us through our experiments in sustainable practices on our blog.
🔗 Link in bio.
Now on the Three Fields blog: Soil, Spice, and Sound, a blog post exploring food migration, international collaboration, and the journey of cinnamon by Samukelisiwe Dube (@samukelisiwe_siphesihle ).
“When I first entered the Three Fields project, I thought I was coming in with a clear understanding of what food meant in my practice. I garden. I make paper from plant fibres. I print with organic materials. I learned from the Black women in my family that food is never just food, that it is care, survival, memory, and sometimes resistance.
But this project stretched that understanding...”
Available to read now - link in our bio.
In her blog post, researcher and artist Deepa Reddy @paticheri explores the cultural and botanical history of black pepper as part of the Three Fields collaborative project.
Deepa traces pepper from its origins on the Malabar coast to its current status as a global commodity, stripped of its original context. Through an installation involving toddy palm leaf paper and binaural soundscapes, she reassembles fragments of the past found in Sangam-period poetry. The project seeks to restore our sensory and ecological connection to this ‘common’ spice, making history an accessible resource for the present.
Read the full reflection on food migration and memory at the link in bio.
THREE FIELDS is an international collaboration between Arts Catalyst (@artscatalyst ), AND (@abandon_normal_devices ), Unbox Cultural Futures (@unboxculturalfutures ), Fakugesi (@fakugesi ), and Fast Familiar (@fastfamiliarstudio ), and is supported by British Council (@britishcouncil ).
This is a sprawling, energetic novel that I hugely enjoyed. There’s a lot of criticisms you could make of it - a book about a housing project in 1969 Brooklyn that verges on sentimental - but it’s funny with great dialogue. The Wire it isn’t but it’s not trying to be. Would recommend. #bookstagram #books #lovebooks #lovereading
Morning meeting location. Not gloating (ok maybe a bit). Just wondering at what point we decided the default for a meeting was inside, sitting still, with screens. Apparently most ppl in the UK have a massive vitamin D deficit, because we’re not outdoors enough. As we move into winter, a season I’ve struggled with, we’re thinking actively about structuring work around places, activities and rhythms that make sense to us as animals, rather than cogs in a massive gross neoliberal machine ✌️ you’re welcome.
#outdoors #outdoorswimming #tooting #tootingbeclido #mentalhealth #mentalhealthmatters
More and more of what we do these days is supporting other people to do new stuff. Still making artworks ourselves but also massively enjoying creating contexts where other people can be creative in different ways. Lovely to see @dandbarnard and @mirko.febbo getting credit for the care and hard work that went into these workshops.
We’re about to start something else very exciting along these lines, more news soon.
#facilitation #workshopdesign #creativity #climateaction
Because LIFE we didn’t go to Sweden to present The Acquisitions Panel today at the ENRICH digital cultural heritage project workshop @playlabskovde .
But we did get to talk about it with an awesome group of people assembled by Rebecca Rouse and Lars Kristensen. Maybe we’ll have some kind of Swedish treat food to celebrate. Although I don’t know what (not meatballs before anyone suggests them thank you).
Also apols if zoom screen shots are giving anyone pandemic throwback vibes 🙃
#artists #artisttalk #audiencecentricperformance #inclusion
