with Nora N. Khan

2 – 6pm

This event has passed. Find the program here. Watch video of the event here.

Trust and Believe is an afternoon symposium of performances, readings, and conversations. It will bring artists, poets, programmers, and designers together to investigate emerging AI through the lens of conversational and narrative design.

This day at Eyebeam is open to the public, and is led by writer and current Eyebeam resident Nora Khan, whose research this year focuses on language design in technology as it enacts various ideologies.

Through discussions, short talks, poetry readings, and a bot-making workshop demo, attendees will be invited to consider how we are shaped by AI conversation and conversationalists, and highly-engineered and procedural digital language. What kinds of AI will we soon be interacting with? What languages will these bots- and assistants speak? How do these conversations change our relationships to ourselves? Why should we prefer to engage with sweet and compliant branded AI over more challenging virtual personalities?

Featured conversations will be held with:

American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist who makes texts, videos and installations about culture and technology and the power structures embedded within them. They are currently a resident of the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Jacqueline Feldman is a writer in New York. She also works in artificial intelligence. Her journalism and criticism have appeared in or on publications such as The Atlantic, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, New Republic, The New Yorker, and Real Life.

Sam Hart is a scientist, publisher, and artist living in New York. Sam’s laboratory work at Sloan Kettering spans computational genomics and cellular engineering. He is also Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the artists’ magazine Avant.org and curator of the online technical catalog, Research Tactics.

Mitu Khandaker is Chief Creative Officer at Spirit AI, making tools for building autonomous characters and mitigating online harassment. She is also Assistant Arts Professor of Game Design at New York University.

Caroline Sinders is a researcher and artist working in machine learning, conversations, violence, and emotions. She is currently an online harassment researcher and designer at Wikimedia, and an Eyebeam/BuzzFeed project fellow.

Francis Tseng is a designer and software engineer interested in simulation, machine learning, games, and politics. In the past he was a designer at IDEO, an OpenNews fellow at the Coral Project (New York Times/Washington Post) and has taught about technology and journalism at the New School. He is presently a Researcher-in-Residence at NEW INC and the co-publisher of The New Inquiry.

We are also very excited to feature first copies of Printed Web 5: Bot Anthologia, which is edited by Paul Soulellis. The Library of the Printed Web is an archive of web-to-print artists’ publications founded by Soulellis, that has been acquired by the MoMA Library: http://printedweb.org/

Trust and Believe is the first chapter of Invisible Systems, Khan’s year-long publishing and online exhibition project at Eyebeam, produced in partnership with Avant.org and co-curator Sam Hart.