Local Cultures – Global Spaces
Abstract
Communing with robots is a post-digital artwork commissioned by The World Science Festival, Brisbane 2022, for the public art exhibition Curiocity. Concerns about privacy, trust, and democracy underpin the work. How an individual’s sense of agency might be affected, and their behaviour modified in the Smart City transformed into a Foucauldian schema of panoptic surveillance by the Internet of Everything. The asymmetries of informational power – a situation where algorithms and those that control them have more access to information about individuals than individuals have about the algorithms and their programmers – now permeates everyday life. Communing with robots was installed in the South Bank Parklands and aimed to provide citizens with a space to linger, reflect, and contemplate existence in a hyper-networked public sphere increasingly mediated by information communication technologies. A playful civic hack, Communing with robots uses artificial intelligence to generate poetic gibberish from a standing reserve of global surplus data remixed with pseudo-surveillance imagery to provide a sense of cathartic relief to the rhetoric surrounding the malicious use of AI. Ironically, while the artwork attempts to subvert hegemonic powers of control, surveillance, and the commodification of everything, the work unintentionally evolved into a banal device that resembles the ubiquitous screens used for advertising and urban informatics that monitor and influence public mobility. This paradox reflects a situation where citizens and public art are subordinated to technologically determined urban spaces encoded for efficiency, consumption, entertainment value, and the commodification and modification of citizens’ behaviour in the city to these ends.
Peter Thiedeke is an interdisciplinary image-maker whose practice-based creative research is situated within the post-digital critique surrounding the emergent smart city, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Everything (IoE). Less concerned with solutionism and the capitalisation of cities, Peter explores creative alternatives to city placemaking through concepts that seek inclusive engagement with local people’s wisdom and creativity. Peter is a Visual Art and Design lecturer at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and has worked and exhibited internationally.