Discover the Artists-in-residence of the Geographies of AI program at Onassis Stegi

Tactical Tech will look at how technology, data and AI increasingly shape our planetary and social responses, as we learn to live in an era of permanent uncertainty; from extreme weather to pandemics to forced migration. Working at the intersection of art, technology and investigation they aim to understand the current moment of catastrophe as a political moment: amplifying increasingly divided and fractured societies, extending inequities and exacerbating root problems.

On a human scale, there is a growing sense of loneliness, hopelessness and a crisis of the individual in comparison to the planetary scale of these challenges and solutions. On a societal scale, catastrophe clashes with the realities of highly populated urban life – disaster mitigation, early warning, efficiency response, oversight and control for millions of people – necessitating the design of new AI-driven urban geographies. In the process to find answers, there will be more and more trade-offs: risk, safety, and security will be negotiated against autonomy, power and the hope of a secure future. In this context, understanding the relationship between normally separate issues, such as climate change and social justice, public health and freedom of expression, will be vital to understanding the questions that AI raises when seen as solution.

Their project will take a tour through these unchartered territories, detailing and exploring findings through an open studio and participatory workshops with invited guests.

Frederik de Wilde’s project will delve into the concept of synthetic remains. It will address questions such as: What is the matter and temporality of remains? Is it subject to change due to progress in AI and machine/deep learning? Do we trust AI to fill in the data gaps of things we don’t ‘see’, or simply can’t access or have available? What if, for reasons such as privacy or scarcity, researchers are prevented from obtaining large enough sample sizes of real-world data to train these complex artificial neural networks? How are speculative future remains reimagined by unsupervised AI? Are algorithmic regimes blurring the lines between the virtual and real even more? Are we looking at a new synthetic real? How will the existence of a physical planet and its ‘datafied’ and ‘synthesized’ counterpart look like? Frederik will explore the concept of novel imaginary architecture, cities, landscapes, maps and archives in the time of Big Data, which might come to be understood as “Big Postmodernism”.