Where do the boundaries lie between the art world and the digital realm of AI?

Join us for an inspiring talk on AI + ART on Saturday March 5, developed in collaboration with the AI Center at ETH Zurich. Leading figures in the fields of AI and the arts will exchange about the perspectives, impacts, and challenges that inform their respective activities within recent developments towards a human-centered, trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Alexander Ilic (Executive Director and a Co- Founder of the ETH AI Center), Sabine Himmelsbach (Director of HEK, Basel) and Nora Al-Badri (multidisciplinary and conceptual multimedia artist) will engage in a cross-disciplinary conversation moderated by Roland Fischer (interdisciplinary scientist, writer and curator). An informal gathering will close the day.

General Information

Sat, March 05, 17:00 – 19:30 | EN

17.00: AI + ART Talk

18.30: Apero

ETH Dozentenfoyer, Gebäude HG K 30.5, Rämistrasse 101, 8092 Zürich

SPEAKERS

Dr. Alexander Ilic is the Executive Director and a co- founder of the ETH AI Center. He holds a PhD from ETH Zurich, and a MSc from TU Munich. Alex is a Swiss- German deep tech entrepreneur, researcher, and investor. He co- founded the computer vision start- up Dacuda which he successfully sold to the Augmented Reality pioneer Magic Leap in 2017. He served as head of Magic Leap Switzerland from Feb 2017 to August 2020 where he built up the R&D Center of Excellence for Computer Vision & Deep Learning in Zurich and a R&D Center of Excellence for Advanced Photonics in Lausanne. He was named twice "Entrepreneur of the Year" (2011 by HSG, 2012 by EY) and won several entrepreneurship prizes including the Swiss Economic Award.

Sabine Himmelsbach has been Director of HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel since 2012. After studying art history in Munich and working for galleries in Vienna, she became exhibition director at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. From 2005–2011, she was artistic director of Edith-Russ-House for Media Art in Oldenburg. Her exhibitions at HEK include Ryoji Ikeda (2014), Poetics and Politics of Data (2015), unREAL (2017), Entangled Realities. Living with Artificial Intelligence (2019), and Real Feelings. Emotion and Technology (2020). In 2021, she curated the online exhibition and conference Hybrid by Nature.Human.Machine.Interaction for the Goethe Institutes in Southeast Asia. As a writer and lecturer she is dedicated to topics related to media art and digital culture.

Nora Al-Badri is a multi-disciplinary and conceptual media artist with a German-Iraqi background. Her works are research-based, para-disciplinary and as much postcolonial as postdigital. She lives and works in Berlin. Nora graduated in political sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and is Director for AI+Art at the ETH AI Center, Zurich. Her practice focuses on the politics and the emancipatory potential of new technologies such as machine intelligence or data sculpting, non-human agency and transcendence. Nora’s artistic material is a speculative archaeology from fossils to artifacts or performative interventions in museums and other public spaces. Her work has been recognised and published globally.

MODERATOR

Roland Fischer is an interdisciplinary scientist, science and art writer, curator and art/science catalyst. Since completing his degree in Interdisciplinary Science at the ETH Zürich, he has been Director of symbiont.space in Basel, co-host of the podcast "supernova" which explores the creative potential of AI. As a curator his work includes exhibitions such as Frankenstein – From Mary Shelley to the Silicon Valley at the Museum Strauhof Zürich in 2018, Re/Public – Public Spaces in Digital Times at the Politforum Käfigturm Bern in 2018. Roland is a founding member of the Turing Agency as part of winning the Kultur Labor Zürich grant under “Creative Tech for Good”.