Wednesday, 29 November 2023, 4-6pm
E22 Lecture Theatre, Main Building
A debut screening of Y7’s latest artwork, Report 5923, followed by a panel discussion with researchers at the University of Edinburgh.
Y7 specialise in the use of artificial intelligence for audio-visual artworks. Their latest work, Report 5923, is a sci-fi film co-written with AI. Having trained a GPT-3 model on Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, Y7 constructed three chapters following the journey of the protagonist, Shevek, who travels to three different planets to compile and transmit what appears to be an anthropological-geographical report. The film is illustrated using text-to-image and text-to-video tools from both Midjourney and Runway, and was soundtracked with a mixture of raw audio neural networks and text-to-audio AI tools, alongside sounds from Y7’s previous audio research. Finally, the project was funded by Elevenlabs, a New York-based company specialising in AI-powered text-to-speech voice cloning tools used to narrate Report 5923.
Y7 (Hannah Cobb & Declan Colquitt) are a duo of post-disciplinary artist-writers working out of Salford, UK. They specialise in the use of artificial intelligence for audio-visual works alongside a written practice of cultural criticism that focuses on the emergence of new social trends contextualised through philosophy, media theory & political theory. They recently had an article published in Flash Art on the topic of the TikTok trend #corecore, as well as a retrospective of Keith Harrison’s ‘Conductor’ performance for the latest issue of The Modernist. They have also worked alongside Shumon Basar on the final installation of his Lorecore series.
Tamara Trodd (History of Art) and Martin Disley (Design Informatics) will join Y7 for the panel discussion, which will be chaired by Beverley Hood. The discussion will critically address the use of generative artificial intelligence in contemporary artistic production.
This event is organised by Ian Rothwell and the Global Contemporary Research Group, History of Art.
