Automation Gone Awry
Automation Gone Awry
Joseph Bova in Who? (1975)
A Dialogue on Accidents, Mistakes, and Left Turns in Automation
In collaboration with CODAME’s ART+TECH Festival 2018 #ARTOBOTS, the Living Room Light Exchange (LRLX) will facilitate a dialogue between new media artists, practitioners, theorists, and festival attendees explicating the significance of accidents, mistakes, and so-called ‘left-turns’ in the quest towards automation. How do such missteps influence current thinking on robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence — either technically or societally? Rather than thinking automation as an idealistic trajectory, what lessons can be drawn by thinking automation as a media-specific phenomena that produces its own new terrain for accidents, errors, and power relations? Moreover, what might it mean to focus on “incompleteness,” lacunae, or failures in a domain such as automation, in which unidirectional forward progress is the prevailing narrative? How might artistic practice in particular — and art that leverages AI missteps — function in our public imagination?
The Living Room Light Exchange — a monthly new media salon dedicated to forwarding dialogue, practice and scholarship surrounding media arts and practice — is committed to current undertakings, unanswered questions, and the way artistic practice speaks deeply about a changing technological world. In an era devoted to the placeless commodification of technology, LRLX is committed to a rooted, sited engagement with digital media. Every month, LRLX events fill to maximum capacity. Therefore it is fitting to facilitate further dialogues — and ones which discuss moments of friction, fissures, and ruptures expressed by expectations of linear progress narratives. Automation Gone Awry will offer new ways to include important peripheral, critical thinking into the 2018 CODAME Festival.
When: June 6 (Wednesday), 3–5pm. @ The Midway, San Francisco, CA
As part of CODAME ART+TECH Festival, a four-day conference with workshops, talks and nightlife event with immersive, engaging, out of the ordinary experiences. Featuring gallery installations, screenings, and performances.
With: Liat Berdugo, Elia Vargas, Brian Christian, Tanya Gayer and Praba Pilar
CODAME ART+TECH Festival [2018]
Living Room Light Exchange Team
Liat Berdugo is an artist, writer, and curator whose work — which focuses on embodiment and digitality, archive theory, and new economies — interweaves video, writing, performance, and computer programming to form a considerate and critical lens on digital culture. Berdugo has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, and she collaborates widely with individuals and archives. She is the co-founder and curator of the Bay Area’s Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art salon; co-founder and curator of World Wide West, an annual summit, exhibit, and performative new media event, among others. Her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life magazine, and others, and her book, The Everyday Maths, was published by Anomalous Press in 2013. Berdugo received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University. She is currently an assistant professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco. More at liatberdugo.com.
Elia Vargas is an Oakland based artist, curator, and researcher. He works across multiple mediums, including video, sound, projection, and performance. He is co-founder and co-curator of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly salon on new media art and digital culture; half of improvisational modular synthesis duo systemritual; board member of the Soundwave Biennial; and a PhD student in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. He is currently investigating the materiality of crude oil and light transmission in relationship to temporalities, flows, and cultural formulation.