Imagine your GPS could see. To answer the question "Do I turn there where that big tree is?", a camera is not enough; the GPS needs to connect what you say to the portion of reality that surrounds your car. AMORE builds machines that connect language to reality, and seeks an understanding of how people do it.
The main challenges are: 1) identifying which entities ("that big tree") are being talked about, both on the visual and on the linguistic camps; 2) tracking the entities as they appear again, adding new information about them as needed; 3) learning these two abilities directly from examples. We face the machine with different tasks that require using language to talk about the world, and the machine progressively learns to represent both the entities and the language that we use to refer to them.
Blueprints For An Emergent Personality
Blueprints For An Emergent Personality responds to the process of the AMORE project: Theo is interested in the ways to conceive personality as an inevitable by-product of the linguistic learning process – how personality emerges from actions. Her project asks: (1) What could be learnt if one treated a computational system that can learn its own representations from data as we would a developing infant mind? (2) How can we represent non-human personality and how can this representation best combine objective analysis with subjective interpretation? She approaches the AMORE computational system as an infant consciousness developing its cognitive abilities – inferring the body (or the embodiment), which emerges from the way the model-as-a-mind displays idiosyncrasies akin to a personality. She will translate the responses of the system into data points and emotive sketches suggested by these slippages. She will then present this data to child psychology and development specialists in order to build a picture of the personality behind them. Theo will then construct images of a mature and embodied self from that of this early stage of its personality – essentially constructing images of non-human selves in a presentation-quality series of large graphite and acrylic figure/machine studies.
About this residency
Blueprints For An Emergent Personality
Barcelona, Spain
A visual inquiry into the nature of a computational system drawing on observation, psychology and imagination
From March 1, 2017
to Dec. 1, 2018
Producer: None
Localization: Barcelona, ES
learning
linguistics
language
perception
psychology
Theo
(Kate Aspinall is Theo)
Artist, writer and academic, I practice art in the headspace and name of Theo. My practice revolves around large works on paper playing with drawn fragility and bodily alteration. My formal education has been in art history, including a fully funded PhD in the history and philosophy of drawing. I have exhibited since 2005 in Scotland, Colorado, and London, including as the most junior fellow in the history of the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute, a member of the Pirate Art Collective and recently received a grant from the Royal Drawing School in London.
Kate Aspinall, aka Theo, is an artist, writer and academic. She has a PhD in the history and philosophy of drawing and practices “art in the headspace” and around large works on paper playing with drawn fragility and bodily alteration. In her STARTS Residency, she worked with the AMORE, a H2020 project that seeks to build machines capable to connect language to reality — machine self-learning — and particularly interested in the interaction of language with conceptual knowledge, on the one hand, and the extralinguistic context, on the other. Theo, in her side, was interested in the ways to conceive personality as an inevitable by-product of the linguistic learning process, and, thus, she approached the AMORE computational system as an infant consciousness developing its cognitive abilities – inferring the body (or the embodiment), which emerges from the way the model-as-a-mind displays idiosyncrasies akin to a personality. She aimed to build an archive of sketches, documents and large presentation pieces that look to the actual and interpreted development of the computational system as a mind, exploring its “personality” and what a subjective world could mean for a machine.
As Theo sayed: “fundamentally, I am trying to think how I can use myself to sense, to visualize a lot of what is going on and, then, use this information with psychologists back in London to analyse what the potential world view of such a model is, making that an imaginative leap to treat this not as a machine or as a tool, but as a being that is creating itself from the information we give it so they can learn.” This was undertaken by attending, initially, to the AMORE project’s physical surroundings, from the micro to the macro — its program language, its technological/material encasement, the immediate environment of lab, the researchers, the building, and the extended environment of the city — and, secondly, to the logic of the system through its errors as it develops and is challenged through the learning process. Then, Theo translated the responses of the system into data points and emotive sketches visible and readable to humans (first stage), and presented these data to select child psychology and development specialists in order to build a picture of the personality behind them (second stage). Finally (third stage), Theo aimed to construct images of a possible mature and embodied self, based on the information gathered before – a series of large graphite and acrylic figure/ machine studies.
