In the fourth edition of DONE, a curatorial team with oblique but complicit sensitivities offers a series of round tables to discuss subjects, languages, tactics and procedures studied or executed by artistic, technoscientific and/or activist agents:

THE GOOD PHOTOGRAPHY
Jorge Caballero (filmmaker, teacher and researcher)
Anna Giralt Gris (filmmaker, teacher and researcher)
Vasily Zubarev (software developer)
Modera: Roc Herms (photographer and visual artist)
15 January, 7:00 pm

Photography has left the digital age behind to explore a new evolutionary state: the computational state. A new stage full of hopes, doubts, miracles and dangers that, in many cases, are beyond the control and understanding of the human brain. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, datasets, neural networks, adversarial images or deepfakes are concepts that we barely understand but that are part and clearly affect our day-to-day life.

Within the framework of DONE’s ‘Unsupervised Imaginations’, this round table aims to establish the basis for understanding this new paradigm we are entering, and shed light on the structural changes that artificial intelligence is bringing to the world of photography, as well as to science, art, creativity, and virtually any discipline.

TECHNOECOLOGICAL RESPONSE-ABILITIES
Abelardo Gil-Fournier (artist and researcher)
Nicolas Malevé (visual artist, programmer and data activist)
Moderator: Jara Rocha (researcher and cultural mediator)
17 February, 7:00 pm

The non-only-digital ecosystems in which the circuit of contemporary vision is implemented occur in a fragile but highly potent semiotic-material balance. Studying how learning or training processes that take place in specific vision technoecologies can be a way of recognizing not so frequent distributions, densities, vocabularies, and temporalities. From archaeological, archival or infrastructural aesthetic perspectives, works such as those of Nicolas Malevé and Abelardo Gil-Fournier provoke necessary more complex questions about which agencies are interweaved in the machine vision, and what are the environmental, political and/or aesthetical implications of this vision in our here-now.

Within the framework of DONE’s ‘Unsupervised Imaginations’ programme, this round table addresses the following question: if in the dense technoecologies of vision, the distribution of power occurs in specific ways, in what ways are the machine learnings and trainings involved in the strengthenings, limitations or blockages of responsiveness (or response-ability)?

IMAGE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND CREATIVIY
Joan Fontcuberta (artist, teacher, essayist and critic)
Anna Ridler (artist and researcher)
Moderator: Martí Sánchez-Fibla (teacher and researcher)
17 February, 7:00 pm

We are witnessing new achievements in artificial intelligence (AI) in the processing, interpreting, completion and generation of images. An example of this is the so-called generative adversarial networks (GAN), which are able to generate faces that do not exist or photorealistic images of landscapes from sketches, among many other applications.

In this new activity, we wonder how AI can affect photography and artistic creation. We will discuss the topic with Joan Fontcuberta and Anna Ridler, whose most recent works have used GAN neural networks. We will also address the limits between the real and the computational imaginary, the implications that it may have for creation, and the significant role they play—the dataset of images with which networks are trained, the architecture of the network itself, the algorithms used to train the network, the inputs and parameters of the network, the results generated, the possible creative transformations applied to the results and its contextualization. A new stage in which the so-called computational photography that we presented in the first session plays a major role.