Can humans teach machines to move?

'Machine Learning' is the second set of films, part of the 'Hype Cycle' series. It builds on past experiments with motion studies, and asks: when will machines achieve human agility? Set in a spacious, well-worn dance studio, a dancer teaches a series of robots how to move. As the robots’ abilities develop from shaky mimicry to composed mastery, a physical dialogue emerges between man and machine – mimicking, balancing, challenging, competing, outmanoeuvring.

Can the robot keep up with the dancer? At what point does the robot outperform the dancer? Would a robot ever perform just for pleasure? Does giving a machine a name give it a soul? These human-machine interactions are inspired by the Hype Cycle trend graphs produced by Gartner Research, a valiant attempt to predict future expectations and disillusionments as new technologies come to market.

Universal Everything (UK): collective of media artists, experience designers and future makers.

Can we translate some of the principles underlying VR, AI and immersion research to choreography, without using any technological apparatus? How is technology influencing the way choreographers perceive and create movement?

With these questions in mind, ‘All around you’ is a performance that guides one audience member at a time, through a path in the exhibition space. It relies only on the body, the voice and simple actions, to create a kind of immersive experience.

This performance calls for the active participation of the audience and to a certain extent it depends on it to exist. It could be seen as a close dialogue between performers and audience, but where those roles sometimes get mixed up because both create and are influenced by what the other creates, making each performance personal and unique.

Sofia Dias & Vítor Roriz (PT): duo of artists/choreographers collaborating since 2006. Currently artists in residency at Champalimaud Foundation, under Bridges to the unknown initiative.

What does the future of human health look like in a world where humans aren't the only ones talking and deciding?

The immersive installation ConsonâncIA presents an experience disrupting the space from which we draw answers to that question and will place the visitors at the intersection of machine intelligence and human expression. Questions like: "Will our hurt and what it means for it to be absent be better understood?"; "Did the machine understand our collective hurt?"; "Did the machine help us understand each other’s hurt?" will be the starting point.

ConsonâncIA will offer a visually stunning and interactive amalgam of identities making up visitors at Metamersion. As participants share more about themselves with the machine, in a personal and private way, a visual representation making up what it understands of them will inevitably change. These changes will express ways the machine believes represents the participant’s experiences of hurt and how it relates to others around. Should this machine intelligence have the curiosity to understand one person in particular, it will launch an invitation to enter inside, where another immersive experience will await.

Team

• Eric Lacosse (US): research scientist at the Champalimaud Foundation; co-leader of the project;
• Filipe Mendes (PT): developer of research devices at the Champalimaud Foundation and a creative building installations, interactive art pieces, and exhibitions; co-leader of the project;
• Leonardo Leitão (PT): autodidact software engineer working at the Champalimaud Foundation;
• Cláudia Ribeiro (PT): lecturer and degree coordinator at IADE - Creative University, specializing in the convergence of Art & Science and research in generative art, VR, and projection mapping;
• Rui Rodrigues (PT): musician linked to new traditional music and electronic music, lecturer at IPCB and a student in Creative Computing and Artificial Intelligence at IADE;
• Nico Espinoza (CL): sound artist interested in socio-political tensions between universal abstraction and local experience present in the contemporary discourses on cognition, ecology and technology;
• Lydia Neto (DE/PT): neuroscience research technician interested in combining creative flair with scientific pursuits, showcasing the thrilling possibilities at the intersection of art and cognitive neuroscience.

Step into a realm where boundaries between reality and virtuality blur. The work features an interactive simulation of human dialogue, in which internal psychological states such as intention or emotion drive the conversation. The simulation is designed to expose the intricacies of human cognition as reflected in dialogue, shedding light on often elusive mental and emotional underpinnings, which drive our behavior.

The goal of the simulation is to construct a closed-loop interaction, through which the visitors can engage with, co-experience, co-emote, and virtually embody artificial agents. In doing so, a safe and versatile digital environment is created, which allows the user(s) to approach difficult psychological states such as trauma, social anxiety, and phobias by reliving those experiences through the agents.

Team

• Immersive AI systems group (DE/PT): working group of the Digital Therapeutics Centre, at Champalimaud Foundation, which develops immersive AI systems for digital therapeutics;
• Lunar Ring (DE): art-science collective that explores new forms of creativity between humans and AI.

Picture a world teeming with AI agents: lively companions, yet with lives of their own. In the bar of the future, immerse yourself in conversations with AI Saramago, AI Madonna and AI You, where real and artificial blur in inebriation. In this real-life cyberpunk bar, customers engage with agents in captivating dialogues. Avatars mirroring visitors also venture into the bar to mingle, weaving an extra layer of virtuality, in an ambience of retro-futuristic fun, strangeness and wonder. The project uses a range of AI tools to create live, interactive agents, with unique profiles and a creative flair, showcasing how some of the wildest fiction have become a reality.

Team

• Carlos Stein (BR/PT): computational neuroscientist investigating the intersection between artificial and biological intelligence;
• Mariana Duarte (PT): medical doctor working on her neuroscience MSc who is interested in researching human-AI interaction to promote health and self-exploration;
• Alex Farac (US/PT): neuro-artist creating media installations exploring science, society, and technology.

In collaboration between Kluge Interactive and the Champalimaud Foundation, ‘Synth Riders - Digital Dance Therapy’ demonstrates how immersive virtual reality and artificial intelligence can blend together dance, exercise and cognitive science. Through the convergence of these methods of self-understanding, this experiment shows a glimpse of how emerging technology can provide precise behavioural and health insights, while we play and explore.

Team

• Scott Rennie (IE/PT): neuroscientist working on creating immersive experiences focused on the exploration of human behaviour and phenomenology;
• Prannay Reddy (IN/PT): neuroscience PhD student, who enjoys doing scientific outreach videos;
• Lydia Neto (DE/PT): neuroscience research technician interested in combining creative flair with scientific pursuits, showcasing the thrilling possibilities at the intersection of art and cognitive neuroscience.

We often hear how AI should serve humanity as a tool, and presently it is widely used to manipulate us. But can the relationship be of a different kind, a creative and playful one, where one inspires the other without striving for control? Can AI be an instrument rather than a tool, a dance partner rather than a manipulator, a wild horse rather than a slave?

In this interactive installation, human motions and music are coupled to generative visual AI algorithms. Multiple human and AI systems engage in this feedback loop, co-creating fantastic audio-visual dreamscapes. At the boundary between control and letting go, each side may learn to interpret and inspire the other, giving room for unforeseeable emergent phenomena.

Various performances – acoustic and dance – will take place, some artists having practiced intensely with the machine, others improvising spontaneously.


Team

• Immersive AI systems group (DE/PT): working group of the Digital Therapeutics Centre, at Champalimaud Foundation, which develops immersive AI systems for digital therapeutics;
• Lunar Ring (DE): art-science collective that explores new forms of creativity between humans and AI;
• Nico Espinoza (CL): sound artist interested in socio-political tensions between universal abstraction and local experience present in the contemporary discourses on cognition, ecology and technology;
• Opiyo Okach (KE): dancer, choreographer and artistic director of GaaraProject, divides his time & develops work between France and Kenya.

Music performances curated by Revolve.

• Rita Silva @ Psychoactive Surface - May 16

Rita Silva (PT): young composer and instrumentalist, she improvises with modular synthesizers and generative programming techniques.
 

• Ricardo Martins @ Psychoactive Surface - May 17

Ricardo Martins (PT): drummer of singular energy, with a post-punk signature, he has worked in various projects such as Papaya, Jibóia, Filho da Mãe & Ricardo Martins and Chão Maior.
 

• Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Atavic Forest 2.0 (image on the left, by João Octávio Peixoto) @ Psychoactive Surface - May 18

Jonathan Uliel Saldanha (PT): sound and scenic artist, who works with pre-language, dub, crystallisation, percussion, allopoiesis, animism and echo


Tickets available online (link here) and onsite, during the event. The cost will revert to the artists.