About
Shape of Words is part of the re-launch opening programme at Phoenix, following its £4M extension build in 2022. We are thrilled to part of an exciting programme of artworks, installations, films, talks and events that are taking place as Phoenix begins the next step of its journey in Leicester in 2023.
In this work, Tom White has used a dataset unique to the Art AI Festival to create a complex map of three key themes that emerged from its analysis. His work asks: What does a word look like? Where are all the places a word might take you? Entitled, Human Create Change, the artwork uses Artificial Intelligence to build an explorable map of all the destinations possible from the specific concepts connected to a few select words. These are cross-referenced against past Art AI Festival records to build a unique travel log of ideas that have been explored by the festival in past years.
The interface for the installation is based on an Eames ‘power of 10‘ experience which gives the viewer the feeling of the vastness of the virtual space, with an interaction reminiscent of ‘flight maps’.
The artwork has used anonymized data collected from participants in research undertaken by De Montfort University (led by Prof Tracy Harwood and undertaken by PhD candidate Georgios Kitsolaris) that explored stakeholder perspectives of the Art AI Festival in Leicester during the 2021/22 programme.
Check out the short video of the work at Phoenix here
Artist
Tom White is a New Zealand-based AI artist. His artwork investigates the Algorithmic Gaze: how machines see, know, and articulate the world. As machine perception becomes more pervasive in our daily lives, the world as seen by computers becomes our dominant reality. Collaborating with AI systems, he creates physical abstract prints that are reliably classified by neural networks. It’s art by AI, for AI. By giving the algorithms a voice to speak in we are better able to see the world through the eyes of a machine. You can find out more about Tom’s work on his website: https://drib.net/about
