Noisy Chatterbots

In this talk, visual artist and quantum physicist Libby Heaney will talk about her wide ranging work with machine learning systems, text and voice, drawing on projects such as Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot, Britbot, Euro(re)vision and her recent AI chanting collaboration The Whole Earth Chanting. Referencing dada poetry and the concepts of apophenia and diffraction among others, Heaney will argue that unlike conventional chatbots such as Siri or commercial web-based assistants, which usually propagate existing stereotypes and biases, Noisy Chatterbots enable new concepts and meanings to emerge. The gap between the semantic content and the imagined aesthetics is a radical site for alternative realities to arise and decay and may enable the ‘other’ to enter and transform.

Libby Heaney’s post-disciplinary art practice includes moving image works, performances and participatory & interactive experiences that span quantum computing, virtual reality, AI and installation.
Heaney’s practice uses humour, surrealism and nonsense to subvert the capitalist appropriation of technology, the endless categoriziations and control of humans and non-humans alike. Instead, Heaney uses tools like machine learning and quantum computing against their 'proper' use, to undo biases and to forge new expressions of collective identity and belonging with each other and the world.
Heaney’s work uses diverse media & modes like blurring, combining, remixing, weaving (derived from quantum physics) to unsettle or ‘diffract’ standard conceptions of ‘truth’. From these foggy modes emerge strange new forms that question the distinction between fake & real, visible & invisible, private & public, the individual & the collective especially where those categories are mediated by technology.

Im Rahmen der Hochschulkooperation zwischen der BURG und der Hochschule Merseburg findet in diesem Semester das interdisziplinäre Projekt „Talk to me – Disembodied Voices and the Politics of human-machine Conversation“ statt, in dem Industriedesign-Studierende der Burg und Studierende der angewandten Kultur- und Medienwissenschaften der HS Merseburg zusammen rund um das Thema Sprachassistenten und Chatbots forschen und gestalten. Der Talk ist Teil einer Vortragsreihe im Rahmen des Projektes, ist aber hochschulöffentlich.