Synthesizing Meaning

2022 - 2024

with Lisa-Marleen Mantel

Designers in the silicon age proficiently mediate between the visceral and digital realms, when designing with and around technology. But how exactly do we reconcile disembodied technologies such as AI, with those aspects of the design profession that emphasize and often rely on tacit knowledge, gained through bodily multisensory experience and interaction? If AI, especially with the rise of Machine Learning heralds a shift from functional programming to systems being capable of performing tasks that are beyond mere automation, we could classify those systems as a new breed – a new species. Following this train of thought raised the question of where designers would place themselves into the equation in order to proactively anticipate this new form of interspecies co-creation. How could we apply our tacit competencies in this novel union? In order to track down these answers, the workshop tied into the concurrent discourse around AI, AGI and embodiment that ranges from materialist skepticism, regarding ML systems as mere correlation machines, to technological saviorism and farther to esoteric techno-animism.

The seminar emphasized the appropriation of AI techniques to convey a high-level understanding of applied Machine Learning while retaining scrutiny on concurrent ethical and societal issues. Novel ways of co-creation with machines were explored, focusing on image generation techniques with natural language prompts.

A Collaborative Exploration

The workshop was oriented towards collaboratively finding an approach to dealing with applied Machine Learning techniques while developing speculative future visions on machine-human hybridization. The workshop introduced and reflected on the views of posthuman thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Katherine Hayles. Participants were invited to construct and share future visions of human-machine collaboration while on a practical level, appropriating AI tools and explore how they could be integrated into their individual workflows.

Learnings made during the workshop through practical experiments served as a starting point to reflect on and discuss possible future scenarios and modalities of human-machine interaction and collaboration. The experimental short film “Borrowed Limbs” served as an example of both speculative storytelling and the appropriation of AI tools.

Practical Exercises and Theoretical Grounding

Following the practice of research by design, this workshop emphasized the designerly perspcective on novel AI techniques. Practical exercises were the starting point for investigating how imagery is inferred and for a deep dive into the data and methods involved in training Machine Learning models.

Participants were introduced to a modified version of a Google Colab Notebook by Katherine Crowson which combines CLIP with VQGAN (“Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network“). This allowed artists to create various exciting visuals merely by inputting text. Through this practical exploration, participants encountered the flaws and characteristics of these models, investigating the datasets they have been trained on.

The central task was for participants to select an organism, human or non-human, and describe a future collaboration with AI as a new species. These speculative concepts were then visualized with the techniques learned. The results reflected on certain aspects of future developments as projected by the participants, and also revealed learnings about how the model ‘ticks’. The outcomes were a collection of generated images reflecting on posthuman future visions, the story of their inception, and the conclusions drawn from them, which were combined into a collective work.