Technology as a Formal Medium: What Artists Bring to AI Research

This event is joint with E+Society and the Beall Center for Art + Technology. 

Location: Engineering Hall (EH) 2430 and Zoom

Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki are artists who approach technology as a formal medium, spending time experimenting with it: learning what it does, what it resists, and what it makes possible, before reflecting on what it signifies socially or politically. Their practice involves reverse-engineering technological artifacts in order to understand them on their own terms—a disposition drawn from their artistic backgrounds.

In this presentation, they will discuss several of their research-based projects, each modeling a different way artists can engage with AI and computational systems. Examples will include an interactive replica of an open-source intelligence surveillance system; a facial recognition algorithm, trained only on fictional characters and returning exclusively false positives, that interrogates how law enforcement actually deploys the technology; an air-gapped LLM-based propaganda machine, exhibited as an installation, that reveals what AI-driven disinformation looks like without guardrails; and a fully AI-generated short film, co-authored with a locally-run open-source language model, tracing the concealment of human cognitive labor from the Mechanical Turk to the contemporary gig economy, using the very tools whose existence depends on that concealment.

Curry and Gradecki will reflect on what artists can bring to AI research: as collaborators in critical design, as builders of public-facing apparatuses, and as practitioners of an open-ended mode of inquiry that doesn't require fixed deliverables to be productive..

Bio:

Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki are media artists who critique the dominant technological powers by hacking technologies to reveal underlying assumptions and effects. They use methods from media theory and science and technology studies as a means for critical engagement. They often reproduce technologies used for social control or that have a significant social impact, including open-source surveillance systems, financial technologies, and artificial intelligence. 

Curry and Gradecki are Associate Professors in Art + Design at Northeastern University. They hold MFAs from UCLA (New Genres 2010) and PhDs from SUNY Buffalo in Media Study (Curry 2018) and Visual Studies (Gradecki 2019). They have presented and exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), Arts Santa Mónica (Barcelona), FramerFramed (Amsterdam), NeMe (Cyprus), Beta Festival (Dublin), and the Beall Center for Art + Technology (Irvine). Their research has been published in Autonomedia, Leonardo, Big Data & Society, Artnodes, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. They were awarded Best Artist(s) in the ‘Artists for Media’ track for MediaFutures transnational support program in 2023. Their artwork has been funded by Science Gallery (Dublin, Detroit, Atlanta, Melbourne), the NEoN Digital Arts Festival, and MediaFutures.