Ars Electronica presents: Ai&Human

AI & Human. Who Owns the Truth? is a unique showcase taking up the Ars Electronica festival theme of 2023. It approaches topical disputes of our time, from data ownership and ethics of data harvesting, to authorship in the age of AI, love in time of crypto, deepfakes and image credibility. Using computer vision and machine learning, Soft Evidence is a series of filmic deepfakes created in classic cinema style. Decoding Bias imagines a therapy for AIs helping them to emancipate themselves from discriminatory algorithms. LoveCounter invites users to an “emotional autonomous region” where they can escape from the omnipresence of big data and manage their own digital footprints. The bizarre images from Planets and Robots are entirely generated by AI, yet animated by humans, showing what it amounts to when humans and AIs are equal partners in the creative process.

Program:

Soft Evidence, Operator (US/DE), 4’

Decoding Bias, Theresa Reiwer (DE), 31’

LoveCounter, Ruini Shi (CN), 5’

Planets and Robots, Antanas Skučas (LT) & Julius Zubavičius (LT), 6’

About the collab:

The 2023 Ars Electronica Animation Festival is a diverse showcase that invites spectators to discover current artistic productions in the field of digital animation. The selection has been mostly compiled of the submissions at Prix Ars Electronica 2023, which shifted its focus this year from Computer Animation to the landscape of New Animation Art. Several exciting programs give witness to the diversity of this renewed category, not only in terms of storytelling techniques, conceptual explorations and technological innovation, but also in terms of their commitment to social change and new political imaginaries.

From the 1,120 submissions, around 30 projects were selected for Ars Electronica Animation Festival, featuring a broad spectrum of styles and techniques: AI-generated images, cinematic deepfakes, hybrids between games and animations, animated documentaries and experimental-abstract works. This diverse selection invites new ways of thinking about how we experience the digital-virtual-real world we live in.

The Ars Electronica Animation Festival ON TOUR, organized by Ars Electronica in cooperation with the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs, comprises five of the festival programs: Electronic Theatre, featuring works honored by the Prix Ars Electronica jury, Austrian Panorama, highlighting current works of local artists, Young Animations featuring shorts from the Prix Ars Electronica’s u19-create your world category, and two thematic compilations titled AI & Human and Data, Bodies Space.