metaLAB AI Art at the Lightbox Gallery at Harvard Art Museum

What can we learn by critically evaluating how we interact with, tell stories about, and project logic, intelligence, and sentience onto systems and machines? AI in Art & Design is focused on making expressive works that deal with the cultural and social dimensions of artificial intelligence. The goal is to provoke meaningful reflection in a variety of arenas, including in areas of privacy, human agency, philosophy, and moral responsibility.

From August 8-12, at Harvard Art Museum's Lightbox Gallery, metaLAB will be exhibiting five new artistic projects playfully and critically engaging different aspects of Artificial Intelligence.

There will be three gallery talks, and a launch event on Monday August 7th at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

For more information, visit the metaLAB website, or email snewman@metalab.harvard.edu

_{Nobody’s Listening video still, 2017}

Nobody’s Listening Sarah Newman & Rachel Kalmar Video installation with sound 2017

Tuesday, August 8, 10 am-5 pm Gallery talk 3 pm Nobody's Listening is an artistic multimedia piece that draws on a database of secrets collected through interactive art installations over the past year. The work expresses human secrets through overlapping computer voices and a visual projection. Why do we trust our phones and computers? Where does the physical self end and the digital self begin? The playful installation explores our intimate but dubious relationship to machines, and reflects back our own humanness.  

_{Turing’s Mill video still, 2017}

Turing's Mill Matthew Battles Multi-channel video installation 2017

Wednesday, August 9, 10 am-5 pm Gallery talk 3 pm Technologies are emerging that prompt a new public dialogue around the nature of cognition, consciousness, and the self. And yet questions underpinning this dialogue have fascinated philosophers throughout history. Is the mind a machine, like a mill or mechanical calculator; or is it spirit or essence, something made of colorless, massless, motionless stuff, transcendent and eternal? Can machines think—and have they been thinking all along? A multi-channel video installation, Turing's Mill is a kind of dossier of evidence for addressing these questions, gathered from found footage, new imagery, and the history of technology.  

Sherlock Jonathan Sun Interactive chatbot 2017

Thursday, August 10, 10 am-5 pm Chatbots are curious, sometimes helpful, and sometimes mystifying “creatures.” The subject of this installation is a chatbot named Sherlock, touted to be among the most advanced, intelligent AIs on the planet. So why would it want to talk to humans? This interactive installation will invite visitors to chat with Sherlock, a chatbot unlike one they’ve ever met.