Event 2 Blog


Image 1: Grace and I dancing separately together


The event that I attended for this assignment was the Love Machines exhibit at the New Wight Gallery in the Broad Arts Center. I had a lot of fun standing around trying not to look silly as I attempted to understand the art pieces that were around me. Everything was super cool and appealing to the senses. The first piece that caught my attention was Grace and I dancing separately together. I’ve always been super interested in machine learning, particularly its applications in medicine (Deo 2015). The idea of teaching a program and then having it “learn” and improve based on your feedback is so human-like that it's really intriguing. I volunteer at the VA and the veterans tell me about pilot machine learning tools that did a non-invasive skin biopsy to help determine whether their growth was malignant or benign. At Cedars-Sinai, I recently connected with a PI that uses machine learning to look for biomarkers of multiple sclerosis. For direct art applications, I am most interested in how artists build their training data sets (Ploin 2022). There’s so much room for creativity and expression when training machine learning models which amazes me. 


Image 2: Description of Grace and I dancing separately together


I feel like I also really relate to the transgenerational burden between my parents and I. I really enjoyed the metaphor between reinforcement learning and the parent-child relationship. I feel like every decision I made always had a strong reward and punishment associated with it and early on, the reward was very extrinsic. Another thing that made this piece stand out to me was the sounds and how they sounded so harsh and punishing. The other piece that I really enjoyed was Chong’s Wet Floor piece. I’ve never seen an art piece using robotics live in-person and I felt this was a super cool experience. At first I didn’t even realize the caution pieces were part of the exhibit to be honest and it took me a few glances before I realized that they were moving. It took me even longer to realize that they had little water guns that they were shooting. I found this really cute and it reminded me of how I saw something online about kids using robot theater in an after-school program (Jeon 2017). My little brother also has a little toy robot that can play music and act out preprogrammed commands. I wonder if we can use it to put on a theater play.  


Image 3: Description of Wet Floor


To me, Wet Floor was able to describe the cycle of creating “problems” just for us to go around and point them out, even as they pass in the span of 10 minutes. The signs are warning people about the wet floor, however the wet floor is caused by the signs shooting water. But the water is not so much that it isn’t able to dry and take care of itself in the span of minutes. When I looked at this piece, I thought about how I complain openly about my problems. Meanwhile, I can also be the cause of many of them due to my actions. Ultimnealy, the majority of these “problems” resolve themselves and with the power of hindsight it doesn’t even feel like a big issue. Something interesting that I learned about was the differences between humanoid and non-humanoid robots in art. In this case, I feel like it was really easy to connect with these non-humanoid robots. I wonder what it would have felt like if these were humanoid robots walking around shooting water and actively saying “Caution, wet floor.”


Sources

  1. Deo, Rahul C. "Machine learning in medicine." Circulation 132.20. 2015.

  2. Ploin, A., Eynon, R., Hjorth I. & Osborne, M.A. AI and the Arts: How Machine Learning is Changing Artistic Work. Report from the Creative Algorithmic Intelligence Research Project. 2022.

  3. Jeon, Myounghoon. "Robotic arts: Current practices, potentials, and implications." Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 1.2. 2017.

  4. Sandry, Eleanor. "The potential of otherness in robotic art." Robots and Art: Exploring an Unlikely Symbiosis. 2016.

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