Marcus Schmickler and Julian Rohrhuber explore the Mind Reader, an invention that helped lay the foundation for machine learning in the midst of the Cold War, and that also had a wide reception in psychoanalysis and media theory by way of Jacques Lacan. Invented in the 1950s by Claude Shannon, the Mind Reader was inspired by game theory, American Romantic literature, and Shannon’s belief that people are not a good source of random behaviour. The machine plays an “odds and evens” game with a human player, refining its guess about the opponent’s next move with each new round. In their project, Rohrhuber and Schmickler sound out the peculiar setup that allows such an extremely simple mechanism to outwit us all. What seemed like a mere zero-sum game might turn out to have been a conversation of a different kind all along.

While many decision makers in Germany still stick to their traditional idea of supposedly serious public media and refer to a selected few other news outlets, mainly perceived either as newspapers, weeklies or websites as "lead media", i.e. the "Spiegel", "FAZ", "SZ" or Welt", the social media sphere seems to have become increasingly important for the public agenda. There, ever more actors - despite of their journalistic training or professional background - publish, distribute and facilitate content as news that often turns out as being either "fake news" or at least poorly investigated. With this communications lab we strive to practically demonstrate how one can stage, publish and facilitate news "at will". Everybody involved in publishing, journalism, media, politics or simply the public discourse is invited to contribute actively to this experiment. Let´s find out how far we can get a piece of "news" out of META within 42 hours?

We are in a mystical self-fueled competition with the machine and it is a strange struggle with the devices we have created ourselves. We still feel superior to the machines and their comparatively blunt sensors. Our multi-layered complex analog thinking still seems far ahead of the machines. at the same time, however, under the concept of big data, we create another reality that is becoming more and more relevant and effective and that completely withdraws our perception of truth. It is a reality stored in bits and bytes and can only be scanned by us through the interface of the machine. It is only through these technical prostheses that we can penetrate this area, because here begins the world of bots and artificial intelligence, which moves in this natural element, which is designed to absorb these data as we do air and water. it is algorithms which are probably the only ones still capable of capturing this aesthetic which is present in the patterns of billions of data sets. The question now arises as to whether we still have the chance to gain aesthetic experience in such a defined world and still gain knowledge within these structures or whether this privilege will remain reserved for bots in the future. Is it possible that in the future only the bots will be able to recognize the truth?

If you think that the execution of voice commands and the technical development of assistants is just feasible for tech-experts, then we'll proof you are wrong. Sascha & Martina from Cognigy guide you through the world of conversational user experience aka Alexa and they will discuss the creative opportunities and limitations. Feel free to join us to see a bot is convertible by everyone in minutes.

Artist Hans Bernhard and curator Joasia Krysa engage in an illustrated conversation about the potential of AI for curating. Prompted by artistic and curatorial experiments from first cybernetic learning and art machines to contemporary curating algorithms on one hand, and recent experiments at the Google Cultural Institute that attempt to apply “machine learning” to organising art works on the other, the conversation looks to the future of machine curating. With contemporary art generating vast amounts of data, circulating through art institutions (museums, public and commercial galleries, art fairs and global art biennials), curators play a crucial part in this system, increasingly assisted by technologies. What happens if the whole of the contemporary art world is seen as a mass of data that is far too big and complex for a single human-only curator to make sense of? The title of the session makes reference to the e-flux project ‘The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By an Artist’ (2003) and instead proposes that this should be curated by a machine.

By reversing the idea of contemporary space travel – what if the planets came to us? – the mission continues a dialogue rooted in the history of mankind and the gaze toward the sky, with an emphasis on a disconcerting application of technology.

Was "nothing" at first? Is there a creator source? Is our world a 3D hollogram of the Alien AI? Digestion is superfluous, take Nano Dr Oetker Food!

Drawing with Sound is a durational performance project which turns the act of drawing into a musical instrument, made with composer Ben Heim from the Royal College of Music. I trained a neural net to recognise shapes that recur in my life-drawing sketches. While performing a pair of glasses with a webcam attached recognises shapes which trigger recordings of a soprano. The performance occurs over a period of time, with the track drawn in charcoal on a white wall and then erased, echoing the repetitions that a machine learning programme goes through in different epochs when training and learning. It is limited in so much as it only works with looking through the specially designed glasses. However as many people can watch the performance and then use the glasses to "replay" the music.

Carolien Teunisse and Sabrina Verhage are hosting a jam session to collaborate on an audio-visual live performance performed by both human and non-human participants. They will encourage participants to use Wekinator (a free open source machine learning tool) to build musical instruments, hypnotizing visuals, gestural controllers, computer vision systems etc. For those of you who are unfamiliar, they will provide a short theoretical introduction to machine learning and examples on how to use Wekinator.

Here, vacuum cleaner robots drive over the screen. Whoever can hold out longest before he runs out of juice wins. Let's feed'em paint! Let's spur them on! Let's bet! Let's just sit back and watch: Is every robot an artist? Do the coincidences in the algorithm already result in an artist's soul? Can one robot replace up to 20 artists in the future?

For 24 hours, we invite you to explore our new HUAWEI P20 series, showcase your ideas on the future of mobile photography, use our SDK, play around with Android and start building something exciting. Yes! Go for it and give us goose bumps! Technicians from HUAWEI will introduce the SDK and provide support during Hackathon. What to win? Of course HUAWEI P20s! ;-) Please download the Freeware: Android Studio https://developer.android.com/studio/ Please note: Hacking groups should not be bigger than 3 ppl. max. Join our Slack-Channel: https://join.slack.com/t/huawei-hack-nrw/shared_invite/enQtMzY0ODExMTQ4NTgxLWRkNmM3YWM5NjBkNzdhNWI3ODU5ZDk5ZWQyMzJjOTQ5ZTlhNTMxYTJkN2ExZDY3NWM4MDA2OTRkNDA2NmNmYjc

Visual search or image recognition are key AI technologies for the next decade. In this workshop we will build a simple app that will recognize different objects in the room using the Nyris Vision API and show you some tricks and tweaks to improve recognition precision.

The workshop aims to explore the physical dimensions of the internet. In an approach of "analoge data-journalism" we will try to materialize the digital by collecting and visualizing our everyday-life data. Bring paper, scissors, rocks and Arduinos…

Debate while running: Participants can run one round around the NRW-Forum with Thomas Geisel, Lord Mayor of Düsseldorf, and discuss the current challenges of artificial intelligence. Please bring your sport gear and a towel. There is also a possibility to shower afterward.

Humankind has perpetually sought to impose order onto the chaos of nature, with varying results. In his classic text Seeing Like A State, James C. Scott argues that four elements contribute towards catastrophic human planning errors: administrative ordering, high-modernist ideology, an authoritarian state, and a passive public. Scott uses the development of "scientific forestry" as an example of not only maintaining consistent yield, but regulating forests to make them easier for humans to see and manage. This tendency continues as we develop "machine readable" objects and interfaces, to make the physical world more legible to the automated technological systems we have created. Recent blockchain artworks take this a step further. In this talk we will examine several examples and their implications.

AI is ubiquitous in our daily lives and the cooperation with autonomous systems will increase. Many of us already use Siri, Cortana or Alexa in combination with smart home technologies. Cars are able to drive without a human driver and Google Assistant is doing appointments with other persons via phone. In order to better understand these autonomous technologies, we will develop an intelligent agent which is able to play Atari games autonomously. This is done in a hands-on workshop whereby you bring your own Laptop and solve pratical AI-problems with other participants together. Therefore, we highly recommend to download the provided VirtualBox image before visiting our workshop. The image contains the necessary software environment so that a direct developement start is possible and can be downloaded at "https://nextcloud.mirevi.medien.hs-duesseldorf.de/index.php/s/OvNqimOvcumJWWa" (x64 architecture required). If you want to start playing around with the image and explore the development environment, please visit https://github.com/mati3230/MetaMarathon. Additionally, no certain knowledge about AI or a specific programming language is necessary. The workshop will start on Saturday at 11 am and end at 3 pm. We hope you will enjoy the event and learn more about applied AI.

Artist Talk - One hour maximum. The artists present at the PENDORAN VINCI exhibition talk about their work. Presented by the two curators Tina Sauerländer and Peggy Schoenegge. The audience can ask questions at any time. Starting 13:00: Designing Mutoids for Mutator VR: William Latham and Lance Putnam will give a short introductory talk on the Mutator VR Organic Art Experience, then Lance will teach attendees to design and adapt their own procedural Mutoid entities on their laptops for release into the Mutator VR: Vortex Experience on HTC Vive. Attendees will then be able to interact in VR with the Mutoids they have just created as they flow around them.

EyeEm is a technology company with a photography community and market place with more than 20 Million photographers worldwide. The EyeEm Vision Technology allows the users to share, interact and sell their images with a special aesthetic ranking and image recognition framework powered by AI. Talk powered by HUAWEI.

In the context of a society that progressively automates human labour, we all have become data workers. Our production of data is exploited by private companies and nation states for different purposes. The end game of these dynamics is the training of AI -making us unknowingly the workers that are developing it. Consequently, the exploitation of data that we are subject to poses structural threats to the fabric of society ranging from political manipulation, over issues of health, to training military drone programmes. The installation Data Production Labour proposes a structural response to position ourselves as workers instead of users as a way to gain ownership of the production of data, in which lays the future of human civilization.
During the workshop we will examine these issues and discuss different approaches to respond to them: Should data be owned by individuals? Or should we commonise data as a public good?

Sustainable Playing — having fun solving human challenges, improving our lives. When work becomes fun and fun is useful. The Sustainable impact of intelligent fun and play. Gamifying work making it fun and useful. Can play and fun contribute to sustainability?

In a very simple way Anna will explain the basics of AI and what all the deep learning / neural network / tensor flow staff is about. Join and be the next buzzword superhero!

In this AI-Design Sprint you will create AI solutions that change companies or even transform industries. You will use analog tools like the AI-Canvas and AI-Card Deck, which make the AI-Design Sprint to a hands-on and playful experience. No prior AI knowledge or design experience necessary. We want people to understand the value they can deliver through AI.

Smartphone companies and startups concentrating in perfecting mobile photography and image recognition technologies open up a whole new world of creativity in our pocket! What is already possible and what will be possible in the future? Join us to discuss with experts and artists from HUAWEI, EyeEm & Nyris. W/ Andreas Zimmer, HUAWEI; Gen Sadanake, EyeEm; Anna Lukasson-Herzig, Nyris; Andreas Ullrich, Artist. Moderator: Seda Röder.

What could be the common symptoms between social influencers, media manipulation, trolls, bot armies, clickbaits, misinformation, conspiracy theories and false facts? In this workshop we will attempt to produce desperate and paranoid diagrams and cognitive mapping which can help us navigate these unfamiliar territories.

Artificial intelligence and autonomous machines present new challenges for our existing models of liability which are largely causative based. Where it is unclear why a machine has behaved in a particular manner due to its complexity or learned behaviours, how are we to determine attribution of "fault" or "defect" for liability purposes? Can fiction based concepts such as Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics or the Blade Runner rule (mandatory Voigt-Kampff-Test) help the legal regime of the future?

Play the Turing Test is a performance aiming to question the different interpretations of what it means to be human and what it means to be an AI. The performance consists of 2 short scripts acted out by 4 groups in front of an audience. Each group performs one of two scripts (one computer-generated, the other written by a human) acting either as human or as AI. The audience will then try to guess which group had which combination i.e. who was acting out the AI generated text as human actors and who was acting the same script as AIs (and the other way around!).

The workshop aims to explore the physical dimensions of the internet. In an approach of "analoge data-journalism" we will try to materialize the digital by collecting and visualizing our everyday-life data. Bring paper, scissors, rocks and Arduinos…

HumanMachine is an artistic experiment fusing improvised theatre with artificial intelligence and telecommunications technology, aiming at exploring the meanings of creativity and spontaneity. We (two humans, one of whom will be connecting from Canada, and one robot powered by AI) will perform a completely improvised comedy show for you, invite brave volunteers from the audience to join us for improvised theatre with a chatbot, and talk about the Surrealists, Stanislavski and theatre theory, performing with a robot on the stage, TensorFlow and recurrent neural networks trained on film dialogue. Come and meet nerdy Albert, dark mYlez and humanoid A.L.Ex for a show like you have never seen!

Communal asmr performance, participants need headphones, shared experience, listening on earphones more intimate, if too many people access museum network there might be some delays (run test), intent is to relax and fall asleep, mixed messages, white noise, idea invite people to fall asleep

Chronic Film is software-based generative video, or a structuralist digital film. In concept, it plays every possible image (every possible combination of pixels) that can be generated on the screen of a certain resolution - 1280 by 1080. In practice, most of these images are actualised as noise. In essence, it looks into the idea of cinema taken to its absolute extreme, to a chronic condition: a film with a duration longer than the life of human civilisation, and with the visuals not made for human perception. The film is currently shown as a part of lecture-performance that explores this paradoxical alienation of imagery and duration from the human viewer. It takes on the ancient Greece as a poignant point in the history of Western colonisation of unique images and cultural artefacts, and draws a line from archaeological work, the mosaics and statues of the island of Delos towards the current moment of the reproducible and ubiquitous digital image. With the help of the algorithm devised for Chronic film, it juxtaposes the practice of figuration to digital noise, seen as a hallucinatory escape from the economies of efficiency and monetisation.

AI + Hacking + Art