Week #6 Creative Futures Counterstructures
Session #6 of tiat's Creative Futures Counterstructures Artist Residency program on Rule 6: “Make AI transparent and conversational”
Machines are taught to see—but what does “seeing” mean to a machine? What happens when it learns from us, and what do we learn from watching it misperceive?
In this hands-on workshop led by Ahna Girshick, we’ll use Google’s free Teachable Machine to train small machine vision model directly in the browser.
You might teach your model to distinguish your idiosyncratic hand gestures or facial expressions, or to identify shadows, or your own unique concept. Through playful experimentation and critical observation, we’ll examine how machine vision depends on our choices of labels, examples, and framing. What counts as a category? What gets left out? Why do certain boundaries fail? Participants will leave with a mini art project of their making—a short video, digital collage, data visualization, or interactive demo—that reveals the humor, fragility, and bias within machine perception.
Agenda
Ahna’s creative practice
Short introduction to machine perception and training bias
Ideation and training of your own machine vision model using images or webcam input
Observe its successes, failures, and blind spots
Create a draft artwork / visualization that reflects on what you want to highlight about your model “saw”
Participant showcase and discussion
Requirements
No coding experience needed
A laptop, tablet, or smartphone (a larger screen works best) with wifi
Optional webcam
Come ready to experiment, mis-train, and reflect on how vision—human or artificial—is an act of subjective interpretation.
Ahna Girshick is an interdisciplinary artist and research scientist who investigates the idea of a primal universal visual language that connects humans, machines and nature. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley in Vision Science, and was a postdoctoral fellow at NYU. In 2010-13, she created interactive musical data visualizations in collaboration with Philip Glass and Scott Snibbe that have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Contemporary Jewish Museum (SF), and The Barbican Centre (London). More recently, her experiments in perception have exhibited through Southern Exposure (SF), Ely Center for Contemporary Art (New Haven), Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (CA), 120710 (Berkeley), the University of California School of Law (SF), and in the White Columns registry (NY). She lectures in UC Berkeley’s Cognitive Science program on shared illusions in human and machine perception, and has recently given public talks at The Commonwealth Club of California and The Internet Archive’s Intersection of Art and Technology salon.
The Creative Futures Counterstructures residency, is a 10-week program brought to you by TIAT and the Mozilla Foundation, where artists and technologists explore alternative approaches to AI and culture. Each week during the residency, we'll have public programming that opens a window into the residents’ process and shares tools, ideas, and works-in-progress with the community. Learn more about the residency: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/creative-futures-counterstructures/
tiat is the intersection of art and technology! we are a 501c3 nonprofit creating places for creative technologists to experiment, exhibit, and expand their practice. ⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ Learn more about tiat: https://tiat.place/