Digital Arts Festival at Tower of David Museum to Showcase AI’s Impact on Art

Companies have been harnessing artificial intelligence to drive innovation for a number of years now, using it as a tool across a wide range of industries. Startups, including in Israel, have used AI to save lives and increase road safety. He powers robots to assist with surgery, strengthens the IVF process, and has become a writing companion who understands context and meaning.

Artificial intelligence is also dramatically disrupting the art world, with researchers creating AI tools capable of generating music and paintings and AI creating works of art that use algorithms to replicate and mimic previous art styles. This intersection of art and technology that created a cultural revolution is why Yair Moss and Danielle Zjni have organized this year’s hybrid digital arts festival – ZERO1NE under the theme of the impact of AI in digital art.

“Artists have the opportunity to work with different tools to create something special,” Moss, co-artistic director of the festival, told NoCamels. “We focus on AI because it is one of the main tools in our society that impacts our daily lives.”

“Examining these new technologies while drawing inspiration from the cultures and ideas of the past allows for the formulation of contemporary creative expressions. I think this idea is in sync with the basic concept of the Tower of David museum, which looks to the past and thinks about the future, ”Zini adds.

The art festival, which will host a hybrid of physical and virtual events from December 27 to 31, will give viewers the chance to admire 30 works of art, six original in situ pieces, nine lectures, 10 live performances, 12 international artists and 28 Israeli artists. Many of these events will be webcast live on the Tower of David website. You can watch it here.

The festival is called ZERO1NE in reference to the two figures which serve as the basis for any computerized activity.

It “delves directly and indirectly into the enigmatic phenomenon of machine learning and examines the place of AI in the digital art world,” according to an announcement. Events will move between different locations in the city of Jerusalem, from the Tower of David Museum to the Hansen House, a cultural center in a historic leprosy asylum at the Mazkeka Pub, a hotbed for the independent and alternative arts and music scene to Jerusalem. The festival will include audiovisual performances (many of which will also be broadcast live), media installations, lectures, lectures, workshops, etc.

Although much of the festival is in Hebrew, including an opening discussion titled “On the verge of a Cultural Revolution” on Monday, December 27 at 6:00 p.m. KST between Dr Milly Perry, President of ABC Art Blockchain and Community, and Art Director Moss on ‘Next of Everything’ (Web3, Blockchain, NFT, DAO, AI and the Metaverse), there are a number of English speaking talks throughout the week by prestigious experts. in technology, multimedia artists and researchers.

On Tuesday, the first of two hybrid sessions called Interspecies Communication Hybrid Session No. 1 will feature installations from artists like 0rphan Drift, Entangled Others Studio, Tom Love, Jordan Colsey + Deborah Fischer + Ofer Kantor, Erez Ezra + Avi Cohen + Boris Levin , Rachella Alcalay, Memo Akten, and more.

Also on Tuesday, a South African multimedia artist explores the similarities between AI and an octopus. Maggie Roberts. Maggie Roberts will discuss the parallels between how artificial intelligence works and the somatic tendencies of the octopus as a decentralized, multi-horizon consciousness. Roberts founded the Orphan Drift collective, which cooperates with Etic Lab, developing the ISCRI project – an AI model trained on octopus. The project combines art, science and technology, as well as experiments on interspecific communication between octopus and AI, with human beings as mediators. The event will be online on the TOD website.

Further discussions live streamed will be available in Hebrew and English during New AI Imaginaries Hybrid Session # 2. Entanglement, ”a conference of further live discussions will be available in Hebrew and English during New AI Imaginaries Hybrid Session # 2. and programmer Gene Kogan and “Artificial Life As Entanglement”, a talk by Feileacan McCormick of Entangled Others Studio based in Portugal on the state of the entanglement and its “Hybrid Ecological Systems”, a series of studies to expose our world tangled.

Throughout the week, the Digital Arts Festival will also feature a number of live performances which can also be enjoyed online. Artists include Italian artist Franz Rosati, whose audiovisual composition, Latentscape, will be presented at Hansen House with music being part of the creation based on the machine-learning generated music and a live audiovisual performance featuring a unique collaboration between the musician Or Edry and digital. artist Carmi Dror who focuses on lens-based art and the creation of digital spaces. There will also be an international performative Zoom session at the Mazkeka pub.

An audiovisual night at the Tower of David Museum on Thursday, December 30, will use the Kishle complex as the setting for an immersive experience that will look at the space as a prison during the British Mandate and a time capsule of historical events. Additionally, Wackelkontakt, a trio leading an audiovisual project that is currently the spearhead of the Jerusalem experimental scene, will build a special light and sound installation based on para-psychological experiences from the 1970s called “Ganzfeld” in German (Ganzfeld in English means “any field.”) Sadan Lab at Phasael Tower will also feature local artists and DJs from Sadan Records, a Tel Aviv-based label founded to support artists focusing on contemporary electronic music and visual worlds. Most of the events that take place that night will also be broadcast live.

The ZERO1NE festival started in 2019 and was born out of a cooperation between the Tower of David Museum and artistic directors Moss and Zini. The digital world is developing at a rapid pace and TOD has truly engaged, welcomed and explored the digitization of history and art, becoming one of the few museums in the world to have its own innovation lab. .

“Six years ago, the Tower of David Museum ventured into the world of AR and VR technologies and opened an innovation lab that would harness that energy and improve the visitor experience,” Berliner continues. “Today, as our lives are hybrid, touched by technologies that we seek to better understand, the Tower of David Museum is proud to once again give a platform to our contemporary cultural world which is changing. and shaped by new technologies and applications – the complexities of which only mirror the intricacies of the city the museum explores, ”said Tamar Berliner, deputy director of the Tower of David Museum.

For more information on this week’s ZERO1NE festival and its events, visit the Tower of David website or the Hansen House website.