Keynotes

Keynotes

We will have three keynotes shared with ACII: Gabriel Skantze, Antonio Camurri and Virginia Dignum.

Beverley Hood

Bots and beings: the arts as a critical strategy of re-imagining

Our encounters with the technological humanlike are exponentially growing and evolving, through designed experiences that assist, remind, inform, train, and seduce us, nudging and coercing our behaviours. There are also the more unintended, accidental, mutated lived experiences, that circumnavigate intended uses and find new ways to interact. The arts play a key role in showing, understanding, challenging, and re-imagining our relationship to technology, giving us new languages to tell stories about our lives; past, present, and future.

This talk will give an overview of my creative research practice, which has explored the impact of technology and science on the body, relationships, and human experience since the mid-90s. It will include digital media and performance works that critically examine how our social interactions have been cultivated and evolved over technologically mediated platforms, and re-materialised through humanlike, synthetic others. I will present my interdisciplinary, collaborative research approach, that embeds the arts as a crucial contributor to conversations about real-world challenges, anxieties, and potentials. Key to this approach are strategies that remind us that our relationships with technology are not purely technical concerns, but are, in fact, ripe with social, political, cultural, and moral questions about liveable near futures.

Beverley Hood is an artist and Reader in Technological Embodiment and Creative Practice, at the University of Edinburgh. Since the mid-1990s, she has interrogated the impact of technology and science on the body, relationships, and human experience through the creation of digital media, performance art projects, and writing. Her work is interdisciplinary and research-led, undertaken in collaboration with a range of practitioners, including medical researchers, scientists, writers, technologists, dancers, actors, and composers. Her work has been performed, screened, and exhibited at international galleries, museums, conferences, and festivals. She is currently a Co-Investigator, on the UKRI BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) programme, leading the Inspired Innovation theme focused on the creative arts. BRAID is a six-year research programme funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), led by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and the BBC.