Artists and Hackers

The Fluid Relationships Between Humans and AI

Lee Tusman
You’re listening to Artists and Hackers, a podcast on art, code and community.

We talk to programmers, artists, educators and designers in an effort to critically look at online art making and the history of technology and the internet. We’re interested in where we’ve been and speculative ideas on the future. I’m Lee Tusman.

This season we’ve partnered with the New Media Caucus, an international non-profit formed to promote the development and understanding of new media art. We’re interviewing five new media artists working today, both individually and at a live in-person event we held in February. This season of the podcast is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts grants for arts projects.

On today’s episode, I’m speaking with the artist Sue Huang.

Huang is a new media and installation artist whose work addresses collective experience. Her current projects explore ecological intimacies, human and nonhuman relations, and speculative futures. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati; Rhizome; ISEA; Ars Electronica; and the Beall Center for Art + Technology. She’s been artist in residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), the Studios at MASS MoCA , and at Cherry Street Pier.

Lee
I just wanted to begin by asking you about some of the areas in which you work and I often think of your work as relating to kind of the nascent practice that’s often called speculative design. Is that a term that you feel you have resonance with? And if, so what does it mean to you?

Sue
I just was talking about speculative design with some fellow professors in regards to thinking about climate change and how a speculative design can help people to think about different possible futures and different possibilities for addressing climate by helping us to envision or think about different possible scenarios or different possible outcomes.

Lee
And how does that show up in your practice?

Sue
I worked with Fiona Raby for two years at New Inc and she wrote the book Speculative Everything where she talks a lot about speculative design and that was maybe one of my introductions to thinking about that process or a way of thinking. I started infiltrating a lot of my studio practice because I started taking more of a worldbuilding or kind of like narrative-building approach in my work. In my project Erotic Ecologies I have been combining ecological texts from the Smithsonian field book archives with internet-found amateur written erotica stories to generate new texts that combine these different language forms together to think about how we can create new languages of care for thinking about global warming and ecological relationships. The output is beautiful, but kind of abstract when taken on its own. So I’ve been using that language and kind of shaping it together to create different kind of narrative flows and different kinds of stories because those stories are what allow us to think about these kinds of different futures .

Lee
I want to get deeper into that but first I was hoping that you would read some of it to us.

Sue
Okay, so I’m going to read a text that is from a work in progress that I’ve been working on now for…I’ve really been thinking about it for a few years, but I’ve just been writing it slowly and thinking about the different forms it could take. This work is called Total Archive. The starting point of the project is thinking about a kind of time capsule from the future which has been discovered and there is a government document inside which has been generated, by an intern from the future who is talking about her process in identifying earth objects which have been lost to time and which are no longer known to humans and so in the middle of the document the intern goes into a kind of hallucinogenic reminiscence and during that section of the reading then this combination of erotic and ecological texts from the Smithsonian then comes into play and so I’ll do a short reading from that part of the text.

Sue
I walked into the branch of a house who cared and found myself nude in airy air. My elephant ears curled on the small ant carpet. My high sandstones tucked under my dress to cradle me as you lay there. My chives felt wet as the snow and after a few more sloshes I looked down and said my long fluffy light is so wet it’s not fair. You’re perfect, you declare. You drape a long cardigan over my fresh breezes. So now I’m dressed like a small yellow breadfruit. I stretch on the bed with a sandy soil sigh, your crucifer’s gripping the waistband of my jeans. Taking in all of the light that is spilling out of my device. You open up my vegetation soil, opening when a golden blob of light, a single tiny luminous object begins to slowly move up and down my body. We’re going over to the other shore now. And when I wake up it feels as if a thousand years have passed through me. My face is buried inside your face. Our yellow birds in abundance. Your smile melts as stiff grasses rush past. My eye makeup is running. It’s pooling around a cold clear lunar eclipse as you throw your umbrella to the ground I lean over to pick it up and rub the small fish swimming at your feet. There is an aroma of a brackish lagoon. And I can’t touch you from here without falling onto the sheepsskin floor. We’re swirling under, were drowning in dark-brown soil memories, eyes closed the wooden box full of whales. We’re under water. We’re drowning in the perfection of a clear white fog. These beautiful days are trembling and breathing shallowly. And then you pull my cold morning into you, pulling so you are there to hold me still, so you can hold me.

Lee
It’s beautiful and it’s, there’s nothing like this. I mean it’s really a new form, it feels like to me. I think particularly I’m thinking this isn’t a straightforward counter between nature and shall we say the ills of technology. It’s more complicated. It seems like you’re interested in how these two are in entangled realms, I think. Does that sound right to you?

Sue
I think that’s really spot on. Like one of the things I really think about a lot is kind of the dissolution of boundaries between humans and our technological counterparts and humans and our nunhuman ecological/biological counterparts. So for me this text is kind of an interesting exploration into that thought, which is mixing together our language about ecology with our language about human desires between humans and then using AI as a kind of generative force for finding the threads of thought that pass through our collective languages. In that way I think it’s interesting thinking about that relationship between humans and AI and I think a lot of like current language about AI is very much about either kind of the threats that AI poses or the kind of mystical fantastical possibilities of a wholly independent conscious AI. Those are two really interesting things I think that are being talked about right now. But I personally am more interested in the kind of fluid relationship between humans and AI, the kind of creative possibilities, the possibilities for AI to reveal things from our own conscious or subconscious. So I often think about AI as a kind of oracle system, like a system which can extract patterns and reveal them to us, because it’s able to do that so well from these extremely large datasets. It’s able to pattern find and to generate and so I think that kind of relationship between humans and AI you could almost see it as a kind of erotic relationship because it’s so generative. It’s productive. It’s reciprocal, in a way.

Lee
There’s a lot of writing enabled by AI now. But a lot of that at least to me right now often sounds quite different. And I think it’s because in some ways it feels like a recitation of facts, real or fake. But you’ve done something quite different I think, because you’ve actually trained the AI. If it doesn’t demystify it too much, do you mind talking a little about your practice for making this work?

Sue
Yeah, sure. Just to reveal the process a little bit, this text was generated using a legacy system of the current system that hasbecome popular on the mainstream, ChatGPT. I’m using a package from a programmer named Max Wolf which allows you to fine tune GPT-2 and that is how I generated this precise output. It’s actually following a two-step process. So the first process was to generate the data set for the fine-tuning. And the data set for the fine tuning was created by first scraping all of the language from the Smithsonian Institution archives. And then pulling all of the noun phrases from that data. So that was about 60,000 pages of text. And that language is then combined together with internet found erotica sentences which were scraped from the internet, about 10,000 stories. And those were combined together in a really specific way using Natural Language Processing, which is an area of computer science for manipulating language using algorithmic processes. So I played with this in several different ways and generated many different types of sentences before I hit upon a kind of mixture that felt and sounded right to me, and then when I had that data set, that is what I then fed to the GPT-2 package in order to generate the final output.

Lee
When I’m walking through museums or galleries I often read the wall labels and that might be because I’m a certain kind of art nerd but I wanted particularly to say what the label for this work says. So if you’re walking through and looking at Part 3-Cloud Ice Cream, which it says on your wall label that you did in collaboration with Dr. Dennis D’Amico. And here’s the medium that’s listed: multichannel live video, computers, monitors, paper, projection. Oh sorry. Paper, projection, CCTV, terracotta, ice cream, custom software. And then again if you’re a real museum nerd. The last one says, variable dimensions. Can you talk a bit about In The Time of Clouds, about what the project is or was?

Sue
So In the Time of Clouds was a project that I was working on that took as a starting point an article that came out of Caltech in which they were exploring a possible climate model in which clouds would no longer be able to form on earth. And the climate model was exploring a kind of feedback loop between the disappearance of clouds and global warming in which the disappearance of clouds would accelerate global warming thereby accelerating the loss of clouds and so on and so forth until there would no longer be any clouds left. So when I read this article you know I thought that it was both you know, terrifying but also you know, really evocative. So when I read about this article I was really interested in thinking about the human relationship to clouds and like our own personal relationships to clouds that are both kind of sensorial like physical like you know, like lying there and looking at the shapes of clouds but also kind of imaginative like the way we use clouds in language to think about things that are really wonderful or like heavenly or you know mystical in a way. And so I thought clouds have a kind of really important place in our imaginative like ecological landscape and I thought it would be important to document clouds if it was possible that they might disappear in the future and I think this project is very much related to that idea of a kind of speculative future so I was imagining, if clouds were to disappear we would need then a kind of archive to document what clouds once were. And so the project is set up as a dining installation in which there are 6 monitors which are each live streaming a view of the sky from a different point on the earth. Across each of those streams are poems that are scrolling which are generated haikus from social media language in which people are talking about how they imagine clouds to taste and then there’s also these white lines which are being drawn around the clouds as they pass through the sky. So using computer vision I’m capturing the clouds from these different points on earth and then they get printed out on what I was calling my cloud printer. About every 15 minutes or so a new cloud would get printed out and each of those clouds was marked with a serial code which marks the location, the date, and the time at which the cloud was captured and then I took some of those forms, the ones that I liked, and then I made these terracotta cloud bowls out of them. And then on the back each of those cloud bowls is stamped with the same serial number code which indicates the location, the date and the time. And so I then placed those bowls in that dining space on the table in front of each of the monitors and I then created a cloud-flavored ice cream together with Dennis D’Amico, who’s a food scientist at the University Of Connecticut. I scraped language from about 10 years of social media data in which people are talking about how they imagine clouds to taste and so this includes both language about thinking clouds might taste like cotton candy or vanilla but it also includes language like these meatballs are so delicious, this must be what clouds taste like. So it kind of captures you know any sort of association that people have between different food items and the sky and clouds. And then we took that data and designed a flavor profile for clouds for ice cream. The first time it was created was at the UConn dairy creamery. And then I also made a second iteration of it which was created at an ice cream spot in New York and then that was shown at Pioneer Works. Lee
And it was very delicious.

Sue
Thank you! It is a really good ice cream. I think. Both iterations were very good. They were different. The second version of the ice cream that I made was with an ice cream maker Mikey Likes It in New York and when we talked about the design of that ice cream we were talking about it being a New York ice cream and so that ice cream ended up having little bits of Oreos spread throughout it, which were supposed to be like pigeons flying through the sky. And it also had little bits of raspberry which were evocative of the red lights flashing on the buildings to warn airplanes from running into them. And so that was really like a New York ice cream for a New York audience.

Lee
Well thanks for talking with me today about your work. I really appreciate it.

Sue
Thank you so much Lee. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Lee
I think there’s a tension within many artists on revealing too much of their process. It’s not that artists are necessarily willfully obscuring what they’re doing as a form of sleight of hand so much as trying to resist a single read of their work, or a single authorial voice or intent. Deconstruction and disruption are conscious artistic choices. And this folds into how artists are using play and experimentation to break form, to critique and re-make culture.

This tension on how much or whether to reveal process feels particularly present in new media art. The tension is: the more we reveal the technology itself, our tools, and software, code, and other processes, the more there’s an interpretation or reduction of the work, an idea that we’re overly focused on the technology itself. And the idea being that maybe the work wasn’t that strong and we’re become overly fixated on the latest tools.

Obviously, that doesn’t have to be the whole story. Just as a chef can learn from another how they’ve approached preparing a dish, bringing deeper levels of appreciation beyond just simply tasting it, with art, we can do this too. We can appreciate a work that stands well on its own, and we can also deepen our enjoyment of the process that led to its creation or its coming together.

As product versions of AI roll out, there’s a tendency of a lot of same-y material to get pumped out. What I enjoyed about learning about Sue’s process and her generosity in sharing it, was that she’s both trained and sculpted the machine learning models she’s using, and as an artist with almost two decades of experience she’s using it amongst many other tools and processes, refining each project to its own logic.

As an artist engaged in speculative design and imagining alternative futures, we might have an image of a kind of artist creating dystopic vision, or on the other hand imagining new solutions to societal problems. And I don’t want to dismiss that out of hand, but I think what Sue is engaged in is a bit more interesting. I think she’s actually imagining stranger futures, more interesting ones. This is true in all of her projects, not just Erotic Ecologies. I found it interesting when she said she was more interested in the fluid relationship between AI and humans, not so much on the fear of a technology takeover that’s reached to the front page of the Times lately, but more on the creative possibilities for AI as a tool. Rather than focusing on the technology itself, it’s one tool among many that we use for humans, to reveal our own human consciousness and our unconscious minds.

Thanks to our guest on today’s program, Sue Huang. My name is Lee Tusman. Our audio producer is Max Ludlow.

This season of the podcast is produced with the New Media Caucus for New Rules: Conversations with New Media Artists. You can find out more by visiting newmediacaucus.org/

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit arts.gov

Special thanks to Jessye McDowell, Rebecca Forstater and Nat Roe.

Our music on today’s episode is:

Xylo-Ziko - Last Night and Rainbow, Anisotropic Psyche - Winter Agony,

Siddhartha Corsus - The Endless Knot, Meydän- Elk, Kirk Osamayo - (Ambient) Fight.

You can find more episodes, full transcripts, music credits, and links to find out about our guests and topics on our website artistsandhackers.org You can find us on instagram at artistandhackers, and on mastodon at artistsandhackers at post.lurk.org. You can always write to us on our website. Please forward this or any of your favorite episodes to a friend. And be sure to leave us a review or feedback wherever you get your podcast.

Thanks for listening.