AI and Craft Practices!?

Welcome to a symposium focused on AI and Craft Practices, Friday 24 November 10 am to 5 pm at Konstfack, Svarta havet. By bringing together researchers from various fields, the aim is to gain a deeper understanding of how craft methodologies, often characterized by slow making processes, meticulous care and attention to detail, can contribute to the ongoing global discourse on AI.

A series of lectures will explore potential threats and benefits of AI as a non-human (?) force, raise awareness about digital worlds being rooted in mined material realities and question what it means to live in a society that increasingly turns to prompt-based models for generating content.

The programme contains a lecture with Anna Mlasowsky, craft practitioner and Professor in Glass and Ceramics at Konstfack, who has teamed up with NikuAI, a group of engineers that build AI solutions for artists, to investigate the potential of training AI on images of glass objects. Another lecturer is Nora N. Khan, curator, editor, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture and theory of emerging technologies who will talk about recursive weaving. Postdoctoral researcher and tutor at PXL-MAD School of Arts and Hasselt University Anneleen Swillen will present Artifcial Intelligems, an interdisciplinary, fluid collective and platform exploring more-than-human co-creation in a digital culture.

Other topics are Speculative Annotation – Extended presented with artist, curator and senior lecturer at Konstfack Agnieszka Knap, Large Language Models by Dr. Magnus Sahlgren, Head of Research for Natural Language Understanding at AI Sweden, Reverberations of The Earth – The Physicality of Artifcial Intelligence with researcher and independent artist Dr. Patrícia Domingues and Ethically Grounded AI Arts, Values and Culture, presented by critical design researcher Petra Jääskeläinen.

Please see the whole programme for further details and info about all the speakers and again – a warm welcome to:
Konstfack, LM Ericssons väg 14, subway station Telefonplan, Stockholm