KIM research group is presenting various student works at the Rundgang of the HfG Karlsruhe from the 19th to 21th July. The works are comprising different approaches located between art and science research involving topics and techniques of Artificial Intelligence and digital media.

Lukas Rehm is presenting a documentary about the HfG excursion to the Human Brain Project in Heidelberg, that aims at emulating the complex organ that is so central to our human existence — the brain — by  designing, in this case, a new non-digital model of computation: the neuromorphic chip.

Ariana Dongus presents her work Computational Colony Capital on algorithmic governance techniques that are tested in refugee camps in Jordan. Her research investigates how refugees of the global peripheries become experimental and precarious populations in huge Lab-camps in which statistic, algorithmic and biometric technologies choreograph and exploit their performance.

Against nationalism, multiply fictional nations! Marco Kempf and Simon Zimmermann developed the wiki framework DeepWorld that comprises new fictional ‘nation states’ with their own flags and anthems. Both flags and hymns have been generated by artificial neural networks, using data of real existing countries. The project is a hybrid of critical reflection on national identities in combination with practical research in deep learning applications, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN).

Vincent Hermann shows that certain types of neural network for sound classification have parallels to the human auditory system. If we train such a network to recognize musical genres, what does it actually hear? What does music sound like to an artificial ear? We can try to get an idea by letting the network imagine new audio clips that it thinks belong to a given genre.  The exhibited audio clips will represent the spectrum of possible examples to which the network assigns a musical genre with a high degree of certainty. Neural networks ‘deepdreaming’ music…

Angelic Algorithms by Anina Rubin are digital prints and paintings that conceptualise the ancient idea of algorithm, highlighting its immaterial and abstract quality.

Michail Rybakov takes on Ernst Haeckel’s studies on the relations between organism and environment. Via the neural style transfer technique, in fact, Haeckel’s unicellular organisms merge with the geological landscape itself and describe an environment of higher complexity. Once again, neural networks help to hallucinate disciplinary and ontological borders. A project developed in the framework of Bruno Latour’s seminar at HfG.

Installation by Barbara Acevedo Strange and Simon Knebl.