The WSI group for Social and Embodied AI responds to the human and social challenges raised by universal networking through the Web and the associated growth of machine learning and other automated processes, known popularly under labels such as “AI” and “the Internet of Things.”
Our aim is to mobilize scholarship and action across the arts, humanities and social sciences. We wish to create a research ecology in which, for example, computer scientists will work with politics experts, electrical engineers with designers and music scholars with mathematicians.
Research areas include AI and immersive media, The cultural history of the Web and AI, AI art and musical improvisation algorithms as social machines.
Email: T.A.Irvine@soton.ac.uk
Good jazz improvisation is the result of a complex social interaction. The improviser’s approach to the “changes” or horizontal chord structures of song tunes or “standards” - classic jazz’s underlying data set - depends on individually acquired historical awareness. A great jazz solo ingeniously “quotes” previous jazz solos and may even shift stylistic register or improvisational language midstream for expressive purposes. Such advanced improvisational constructions are in turn preserved (often by mechanical media) and become part of a given jazz community’s “memory” of a tune. Thus an excellent improvisation “annotates” the original tune and is situated within that tune’s history.
One might claim that this intertextual quality of a great jazz improvisation parallels the validation of financial value by blockchains. The blockchain - numerical data that aggregates over time - requires ever more computer power to authenticate financial transactions. Likewise, to “know” the improvisational history of a tune, an AI would require significant amounts of training data. The result would entail statistically governed appearances of “historical” material in idiomatically and communicatively effective locations or contexts. The problem seems complex: even if it had access to the entire history of jazz, how could an AI, on the basis of statistics alone, know what to do and when?
Taking a critical approach to notions of creativity and imagination as a focus - and the cluster’s home within an art school as an inspiration - it foregrounds on the one hand the professional and political generation of ideas and cultural products and on the other everyday consumption, play, activism and participatory culture. We emphasise the transformations of media, design and cultural industries and their creative practices wrought by digital media and social networks, and the playful, political and bottom–up cultures they facilitate.
Throughout, the group keeps an eye out for the distributed, the political, the experimental, the affective, the queer, the playful, the transgressive and disruptive within creative industry and the everyday.
Archaeologies of Media and Technology (AMT) is a research group that approaches technology and media writ large through their links to science, art, visual culture and critical theory with a strong emphasis on artistic practices. We investigate the conditions of existence of contemporary media technologies through design and art, in relation to both contemporary culture and cultural heritage with an eye toward the future.
The group rethinks computing through surprising, innovative and fresh approaches. It is an office for speculative ideas, grounded research and investigations into the contemporary.