I wanted to say thank you to all the PhD students from the critical data research group that are here to present actually their research. We had the idea some, I think it was two years ago that we actually already did it. We wanted to use the chance during our Electronica Festival to include you experts that you're all here at the festival. So I was actually asking the PhD students to bring somebody that they know that is maybe at the festival and that can give a feedback to the research that is actually going on. So what you will see today is six presentations. give feedback to the research that is actually going on. So what you will see today is six presentations with each 10 minutes and we will have a time for feedback. I would like to invite you ambassadors to actually give feedback to the students. For us it's very, very valuable. What you think, also what you, like what comes to your mind when it comes to similar artworks, when it comes to other artists, scientists that you actually know. We are always happy in getting additional contacts, also from your network. And yeah, whatever comes to your mind, we're happy about. I would like to mention also who are the special ambassadors that have been invited. I would like to start here also with Julia Kloiba and Fernando Velazquez. These are the ones that also give a guest lecture in the evening or let's say in the afternoon at five o'clock. And so we will hear also a little bit about your research, which is then also part of the feminist AI lecture series that we also started a year ago. So Julia and Fernando are the ones who are the ones who are staying the whole afternoon with us for giving feedback. And every student, and here I would like to start with Alexia Achilleos. Well, I'm speaking, no, I'm speaking English. We'll start with Alexia Achilleos. Alexia was inviting Alessandro Ludovico. So it's really great to have you here with us and yeah Alexia all the students have 10 minutes to present their research we also have here some posters about the works so within this kind of time in between the presentations please also have a look on the posters and yeah because I think they give quite a good overview about the status quo of the research and what did I forget I think we just start we have time then also afterwards to discuss further I also would like to invite our partners from SKKU in Korea who are here also in the back who will also present then because they are the partner university from HES, who also will do a PhD presentation here. So it's really cool that we have also Korean University SKKU here being part of this critical data research afternoon. And you will also give some presentations. Yeah, let's start. Thank you, Alexia. Hello. Hi, everyone. So I will be presenting a work in progress. So I thought I could share what my progress is and then have some discussions of, you know, the further steps in developing it. some discussions of the further steps in developing it. My PhD research focuses on the coloniality in AI with a special focus on how that impacts Cyprus, an island on the eastern Mediterranean, an ex-colony of the British Empire, and this kind of hybrid in-between region between West and non-West, that is in the peripheries of the global AI race. And I look at it from a post-colonial, decolonial and intersectional feminist perspective. Part of my artistic practice involves artist games. I'm influenced by Mary Flanagan's critical play methodology in which games, quote, function as instruments for conceptual thinking or as tools to help examine or work through social issues, unquote. And through these games, we collaboratively examine the AI's societal impact on a local level together. Yeah, on a local level. level together and yeah, on a local level. And I'm currently working on this card based storytelling game slash artwork called the Fox who tricked the super intelligence. As I said, it's a work in progress. And through this game, we create collaborative folk tales that are based on big tech companies mythologies about artificial general intelligence and the plan is to then create an online anthology of these stories that we create together and have some kind of artwork participatory arts installation and for the game i was interested in this one goal that tech leaders are prioritizing right now, which is the global race towards AGI. Big tech companies have this goal of achieving this super intelligent AI system that is as intelligent or superior to humans. And these are very messianic imaginaries of this artificial super intelligence, which according to tech companies, PR statements will either come and save all of humanity and fix all our problems. Or if it's the wrong person who manages to do it first, then it will destroy us all. And these are stories about the future that are controlled by just a handful of powerful entities and these narratives these are narratives that the global media often disseminates in a very uncritical way and they end up platforming those with self-interest. And with that in mind, I was interested in the imaginaries about AI with regard to Roland Barthes' mythologies, work on myths, how myths can be used by the ruling class to either naturalize ideologies as objective, depoliticize as narratives, and they make these myths seem as if they're universal. And similarly, the most recent report by the AI Now Institute refers to AGI mythology that is shared by tech companies as benefiting the priorities of the companies themselves, making the technology of AGI seem inevitable, imminent, worthy of investment, while centralizing power without any oversight. And in addition, TeamNeedGebru and Emil Torres have mapped these ideologies of tech pros. tech bros. There's this cluster of interconnected techno-futuristic ideologies that are influential both in Silicon Valley and beyond. And these are ideologies that shape the work and the narratives of these AI leaders. Their visions of the future in which technologies such as AGI might one day enable us to live until we're 200, or we can send superior humans to colonized space to save humanity. But these views can create a very distorted and exclusionary future. Gebru and Torres, they compare these ideologies to colonial eugenics that ask questions like whose intelligence is superior to others, who deserves to survive more than others. And just like colonial empires would claim that they're bringing civilization to the places they took over, in a similar way, tech leaders act like they're saving the world through their own technology. Meanwhile, those least likely to benefit from the technology are already being disempowered through the control and extractivist and exploitative practices of the AI industry. And although the ruling classes have historically used myths and folklore to consolidate and legitimize power, the folklorist Vladimir Propp argues that folklore is inherently subversive, and according to him, folk tales can serve alternative narratives that resist and challenge the dominant ideologies of their time. And in this way, folk tales can become instruments of colonial or feminist resistance. understanding of folklore as a side of resistance has led me to design this game in which players collaboratively create folk tales about AI and the future, in a way alternative technological futures. And in this way, the power to tell stories about AGI and the future is no longer confined to the perspectives of just a handful of entities but we distribute storytelling among players according to their own values. The game takes place in a parallel world. It's inhabited by humans but also other entities. Some of these entities might be supernatural and And in this world, a civilization has promised that an all-powerful superintelligence is coming, or maybe it has already become a reality in the game. And through the stories we create, we find out what happened. Did the superintelligence save humanity? Did it make the world a better place? Did it destroy everyone? Did the world's inhabitants resist or use it for the benefit of their communities? The game is still at a prototype stage, you can see it there next to my poster. I've become playtesting it. Very briefly, the game is inspired by the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, where each participant adds a composition and they take turns into creating a bigger composition. And by Dixit, a storytelling card game that was designed by Jean-Louis Roubira that uses this dreamlike illustrated cards. And in this game the players take turns to, and they respond to these various story prompts, and they build on the narration of the previous player. And they respond by using these very ambiguously illustrated cards, which they're free to interpret as abstractly or as literally as they like and the prompts the story prompts they are based on the work of vladimir prop the folklorist and the japanese folklorist hayao kawaii because they've been studying the structure of folk tales and this helps keep players create these structurally sound arcs of stories that are similar to the structure of folktales. The aim is to create stories at different geographical and cultural localities and kind of challenge this universalism of big tech narratives. This is the first story we created during a playtesting session. You can read it in full on my poster if you're interested. Because of the collaborative nature of the game and taking turns in playing, being limited by the game's rules, the resulting stories can be quite chaotic, absurd, but it's interesting to see how these stories differ from location to location and the types of players who are playing it. diffuse ownership and you know have some alternative stories in a world that's oversaturated by the narratives of just a few elite and yeah as I mentioned it's a work in progress so I have a prototype which I need to finalize I need to work on the illustration and the design so imagine the most beautiful cards you've ever seen and the plan is to then play it with different groups in different localities and the stories that we create will form an anthology of folk tales and I'm now thinking how what kind of form this anthology collection will take it would like to be something that's online, accessible to everyone who have played these in different countries. So yes, that's the next steps and work on the installation part of it as well. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Alexia, you are now in which year? Third year? Third year, exactly. Alessandro! Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me to respond, of course, to it. I would like to highlight some characteristics of the work of Alexius quite briefly. But first, I found a very direct connection, especially for Falk Days, to the oral culture, which is, I mean, possibly the very first medium that we ever had, and a medium that was not physical. And speaking of superpowers, the superpower of oral culture was that it was collectively elaborated and maintained with no other technology than a mass of brains, basically. Which is quite fascinating when you think about artificial intelligence and all the technologies we are surrounded by nowadays. And nonetheless, it was an efficient data infrastructure based on the stimuli of creating the stories, adapting and remembering them. So there was also the storage, if you want, the human storage, resulting as an invisible collective cultural asset. In Alexia's work, the physical presence during the game presence during the game, that enacts the generation is opposed to what we know is the machine-based generation. And what happens, possibly, here, or we might say, we might claim, is that it claims back the responsibility of the storytelling and breaks the isolation that is usually induced by machines in general, by AI in particular. I wanted to mention that all these different ideologies, I almost accidentally got in touch with one of them 30 years ago, the transhumanists. in touch with one of them 30 years ago, the transhumanist, they are all very strictly based on addressing the singular person as an ideology. And I mean, generally speaking, the big techs are exactly doing the same in order to foster their products. So the physical presence is then important and it's challenging it. And it's not a machine that is asked to use statistical storytelling to very quickly assemble a story. But it's a small community that, this is very important, negotiates. I mean, I guess, of course, I just learned about it yesterday. But I guess that when it comes to the sides, some parts, there's a dialogue among the different people. So there's a negotiation that, of course, never happens with the machine. that, of course, never happens with the machine. And they have to agree and acknowledge the results. So there's also a mutual acknowledgement in this small community. Another element which is very important is the animals and especially the routing of this information in local meanings. But at the same time, for example,, choose the fox, which is a recurring element in the fox tales from different cultures, thanks to its unique characteristics, especially the fox's challenging human allegedly superior smartness. I remember, sorry, a personal anecdote. My uncle was a farmer fighting all the time to prevent chicken eggs to be eaten by foxes and systematically failing everything he was conceiving. So this superior smartness is something also kind of supernatural, so very useful in folk tales. And it's the same with the mouse. The game then is using iconic and easily shareable elements, so almost universally understandable. Or, in other cases, sufficiently abstracted to be then localized like plants. I noticed the icon of plants, and then every local plant can be taken as a symbol somehow. Moreover, I think that the work position itself in the current debate about the importance of physical presence versus digital one. And to reclaim time and space in order to regain freedom to think with no machine listening or interfering with our thinking. Which results then as another element when it comes to imagine the artificial general intelligence, which, I mean, we can maybe finally define it as the mother of all the listening and interfering entities. And it's interesting here that using an old analog technique like collective storytellings, assumes then a clear political position, which privileges a collective elaboration and memory versus the delegation to the machine, which is mostly what AI is about. As a reference, of course, sorry, I wanted to mention just one more element, technical, the cards. The cards, if you think about the games with cards, they are really the physical element that connects the different players. So it's not only the community that is there, but there's also a physical element literally connecting them. I would suggest one particular text that explores our culture. I mean, it's considered probably the most important text about that, which is from the 60s, if I'm not mistaken, Orality and Literacy, the Technologizing of the World by Walter Ong, who is considered the best scholar exploring oral culture. And this connecting, he was a friend of McLuhan, so it was connecting then to the media revolution back then. I think it's a very interesting reading. I wanted to underline another element and then a couple of examples of other uh use of cards for strategies the other elements is the folklore versus fake facts i mean the we we talk nowadays there is this element of talking about digital folklore I think that the term folklore is used wrongly here because it's not, I mean, it's generated by a minority, not by folks. And the free, I mean, the folklore properly said instead, uh, has a very important difference is admittedly a fantasy, which instead the digital folklore goes exactly the other way around. They want to affirm hidden truths instead of fantasy. So using it admittedly as a fantasy is also a political gesture. And the metaphors then becomes the tools, I think, of this gesture. I just wanted to mention two cards. They are not technical games, but they have interesting nuances during the play, beyond, of course, the famous Exorcist corpse by the Surrealists. I'm sorry, they are both from the 70s. One is Distant Early Warning, elaborated by McCluhan and Quentin Fiore. They are basically taking a classic deck of cards and hiding messages in most of the cards and they are then elaborating games that intersect the classic deck of poker cards, let's say, with the messages inside. It's also an interesting strategy. And of course, I can't prevent myself to mention Oblique Strategies by Baianino, which is a more personal, let's say, game. It's not technically meant to be a collective one, but still, it can be played collectively. I'm sure there will be further things that come to mind, but of course I will show them later. Thank you. Wow, you are already defending. This was your defense, you and Alessandro was part of your commission now, right? Do you have a question to Alexia? No, the question, sorry. No, but there is maybe other questions? Yes, exactly. So, thank you so much for the project presentation. From everything that we've heard, you said that you are thinking about making a digital version, right? And I'm thinking, what about an analog, like printed home version, right? Would that speak better to the point of the whole deck? And then when you think digital version, were you thinking mobile first? Because many people are only online on mobile phones. And I've seen a lot of card deck websites that only really work on desktop machines. And then maybe just to add to that, are you familiar with the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies? This might be interesting to check out. It's a project by an organization called Coding Rights from Brazil, Joanna Veron. And my last question is, how do we make sure we tell these stories without falling for PR language buzzwords can there be like choker cards that disrupt the game and tell you like you're forbidden to use like word xyz I don't know just some thoughts yeah thank you for the questions the first question was whether there could be an analog. Yeah, yeah. I would like to do both. I would like to have an analog as well as an online version. The online is so that, for example, now I started working on this while on a residency in Japan. And I already played it with quite a few people there. So it would be nice for them to be able to access it easily that's why the priority would be to have an online um kind of home for the stories too but yeah i would i would love to also do an analog one um the question ah yes um the i can actually walk Yes, I can actually walk. I'll show you here in the game. There's actually no PR language much at all. Yeah, because I've been playing it with different people and most of them have not been people who really play, who know much about AI. So there hasn't been that much PR language and we also have this kind of secret goal cards that each player has and that they have to kind of include something in the game so that can be something very can you hear me so for example you can have a ritual that reshapes reality that has nothing to do with technological PRs, but then there might be something like a glitch or something. So far, I think only maybe one or two stories we've created so far have some more PR narratives to it, but most of them have not been quite surreal. First of all, thank you, Manuela, for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here with all of you this evening. Alexia, I like very much the project. For sure, at some points I will lose in translation because I came from Brazil. It's still like fuzzy yet. And also the fast of the speaking and how these deep ideas flow over the screen. But I have some stuff that I want to divide with you. I like very much the way you actualize, a way the myth, because mostly even first I think when I try to understand that we are in a very specific ambient, people are not so familiar with this kind of knowledge. So this is the first point. You are bringing these issues to everybody. This is very important. So the technique you use, the cards. And to actualize the idea of myths, so we are constructing myths is not something of the past, you know. And it's also, we used to think on these issues on artificial intelligence and the companies and what is happening to what we used to call reality. But are they myth actually? As Alessandro said, most times sell is at it. But actually are like statements. And to rethink this idea of the performative of language, I will talk about that later, but this idea that when we said something, we are making reality, and these people know very well. So you are challenging this idea to giving the opportunity to people first to think on this stuff that they don't know about it, and then to be aware. Oh, I never thought about that oh look, when I do this on Google this is happening in that place of the world, this is very important it's a way of thinking that we develop but no normal people have it almost so to use the myth, the supernatural or this idea also sometimes, I'm from Brazil we have a lot of ancestral knowledge there and we are reviewing all that knowledge, how this knowledge can help us to rethink what we are doing there. And this idea of sobrenatural, supernatural is very common for people from the Amazonia. They don't need to know everything, they know it, their body knows it. So this is also a nice strategy. We are thinking, but we think with the body not with the head. Most time we are thinking with the head and you are putting the body of the people to think on this new mythology. Also visually you use these icons that is also a kind of lettering to teach people how to read it. We know it again again, because we are in this medium. But people often in this society are most aware of transit sign or supermarket sign. So they need to abstract, to think on what it is, what could be. They realize that each icon is something different for different people, so it's not like normal language. This is also an epistemic way of approach originality, I think. The loop, this idea of loop. So we are constructing an idea together, but we end at the beginning. This is not what this kind of society expects, because they talk about future progress. So at the end, when you've been two hours playing together, and we arrive at the same point that we start, what's happening there? It's chaotic, absurd, also the exquisite corpse, this nonlinear thinking thinking, it's not common. And it's also what artists or what thinking, it's the creativity process divided with the people. You know, this strategy, how we can bring a novelty to our lives, being more wild. novelty to our lives, being more wild, you know, this idea of exquisite scopes or disruptions are very important on that. Finish? Yeah, the last idea. I think it's that, yeah. Thank you very much. Do you want, is there something that you want to reply to? Giving you the time also to reply to it if you want. Thank you. This has been really very good speaking with you and hearing feedback from you as well. In Japan I was mostly working with game designers on the mechanics of the game. So it's very, very useful to hear these kind of more artistic, theoretical perspectives about it as well. And I'll take this into consideration for sure. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you so much, Alessandro, Fernando, Julia.