Ground
Works

ASKXXI: Arts + Science Knowledge Building and Sharing in the XXI (21st) Century was a US-Chile pilot program fostering inquiry and inter-hemispheric collaboration in art, emerging technologies, and the ecological sciences. Funded through a US Embassy public diplomacy grant, ASKXXI was an adaptive curriculum model situated on a collaborative platform of academic partners. This model provided freedom, flexibility, and responsiveness to dynamic learning and professional development opportunities. The year-long pilot was customized to a jury-selected cohort of Chilean professionals working at the intersection of art and science. Experiential, site-based workshops in arts, ecology, embryology, biomechanics, technology research, and science communication provided exposure to frontier research scientists, data visualization and immersive technology innovators, as well as contemporary artists focused on ecology. Despite the inherent challenges in launching such an independent and distributed program, ASKXXI expanded professional capacities and opportunities. Most importantly, the program activated a thriving ecosystem of practitioners working on pressing issues of sustainability, biodiversity loss, and climate change in both regions. An “ecology of practices” is the framework of our transdisciplinary pilot that tested the feasibility of interhemispheric knowledge exchange, interdisciplinary and institutional collaboration, and impact-focused cultural and scientific diplomacy.

Watching and Dreaming is a body of work that enables the viewer to peer inside the “mind” of a machine to observe its perceptions, mind wanderings, and dreams. This is not a metaphorical representation of dreams, nor a technical exercise in AI such as DeepDream [1] but the realization of a computational model of dreaming informed by cognitive neuroscience. This level of description avoids biases towards Jungian and Freudian psychology that assume dreaming is exclusively human. Dreams should not be considered independently of the perceptual capacities of the dreamer, and thus comparing this model to human perceptual abilities is problematic. For the audience, these artworks function as entry-points to consider the constructed nature of perceptions and the continuity of waking, mind wandering, and dreaming. For the artist, the artworks are sites of knowledge-making; it is through the making of artistic works that the model (computational formalization) and theory (argument that situates the model in empirical knowledge) are developed. The research underlying these artworks integrates knowledge in multiple disciplinary dimensions: (a) The computational modeling of dreaming processes (Zhang 2009; Treur 2011), (b) generative and media artworks engaging with the concept of memory and dreaming (Franco 2007; Dörfelt 2011), and (c) the conception of dreaming as imagination (Nir and Tononi 2010). In this text, Watching and Dreaming (2001: A Space Odyssey) (2014) serves as an exemplar of the Watching and Dreaming body of work. The machine attempts to learn and predict Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey through the construction of its own subjective perception that is the basis of dreaming. “Mental” images generated during perception, mind wandering, and dreaming are subjective constructions bound to the peculiarities of the machine’s way of seeing. The body of work constitutes various manifestations of the cognitive model, not attempts to communicate the model’s mechanisms.