New York Live Arts 2019 Live Ideas Festival Line-Up

An annual interdisciplinary humanities festival, Live Ideas is a high point of the New York Live Arts season. This year's festival, Live Ideas 2019 - AI: Are You Brave Enough for The Brave New World?, presented May 8-12, at New York Live Arts, will offer five days of activity designed to imagine the future and understand the current conversation surrounding Artificial Intelligence. Through public forums, performances, exhibitions, workshops for children and adults, a symposium on AI and art, and a HACK-ART-THON, the festival focuses on Artificial Intelligence for the general public from the perspective of its societal, cultural and artistic implications. Live Ideas 2019 moves past AI anxiety, so the technophile, the technophobe and the tech-curious can participate in the AI driven future in an informed, human-centered and meaningful way.

"This year's festival, 'Live Ideas 2019: AI, Are You Brave Enough for The Brave New World?' will interrogate the dramatic changes AI is bringing to our world and examine what it means to be human as we look toward the future," states Bill T. Jones, Live Arts' Artistic Director.

Opening the festival on May 8th at 6pm is the Keynote/Performance What is AI?, a lecture in the form of a performance and vice versa, giving an overview on the past, present, and future of AI. Delivered by a cast of scientists, technologists, artists and performers, the evening features composer and vocalist Nick Hallett; professor of digital journalism at NYU and author of Artificial Unintelligence Meredith Broussard; Hip hop, spoken word and theatre artist Baba Israel; New Yorker staff writer, author and humorist Patricia Marx; and drag performance artist Ragamuffin. Hallett, Israel, and Ragamuffin will be premiering original work.

The same night at 8pm, Live Arts Lobby will hold the Gallery Opening Reception for Portrait on the Fly (2015): An Interactive Installation by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau. The interactive installation consists of a monitor that shows a swarm of thousands of flies. Additionally the reception will kick off See Sound Pop-Up Performance which will then run for the remainder of the festival. Created by Rama Allen and the creative team at The Mill, a different singer/vocalist will perform 10 minutes at 8 pm every night in See Sound; a generative artwork experience that creates sound sculptures based on the human voice. Each user has access to a microphone and hardware interface. Triggering different visual behaviors within the music visualizer based on experimentation, each user leaves with their own bespoke sound sculpture. The resulting media can be sent to each user immediately afterwards.

Performances include headliner discrete figures 2019 from Japanese Rhizomatiks Research x ELEVENPLAY x Kyle McDonald, nightly May 8-11. Five female dancers execute choreography with machine learning technology on a stage designed for interactivity between performers, drones, and Artificial Intelligence; InRational Numbers: Music and AI on May 9 at 9pm, co-presented with Music Community Lab, renowned New York based composer/performer/improvisor/producer Yuka C. Honda and composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón, will experiment with AI technology as a creative tool. Algorave by LiveCode.NYCon May 10 at 9pm features sets from Scorpion Mouse, CIBO + Ulysses, Popple, Colonel Panix + nom de nom, ioxi + Zach Krall, and Codie who create both music and visuals by programming computers live in front of an audience, some of whom experiment with machine learning and other AI technology.

The first of two discussions of the festival include the Future of Work panel on May 9 at 6pm that looks at the effects of AI and automation, the changing nature of work, and the strategies against widening inequality; featuring panelists Arun Sunderarajan (Professor and the Robert L. and Dale Atkins Rosen Faculty Fellow at New York University's (NYU) Stern School of Business and author of The Sharing economy), and Matthew Putman (scientist, musician, CEO of Nanotronics). This discussion will be moderated by Rachel Korberg (Program Officer at Ford Foundation Future of Work Initiative).

The second panel discussion on May 10 at 6pm Does Truth Need Defending?delves into the world of deepfake videos and synthetics images, their very serious implications, and the tools to spot the real from the fake. Panelists include Sam Gregory (program director of WITNESS), and Hilke Schellmann (Emmy-award winning investigative reporter and assistant professor of journalism at NYU), Jeff M. Smith (Associate Director, National Center for Media Forensics at UC Denver). The discussion will be moderated by Malika Saada Saar (human rights activist and Senior Counsel on Civil and Human Rights at Google).

A Symposium on AI X ART will be held Saturday May 11, 4:30 - 7:30pm, explores how artists, performers, technologists, and curators use AI to create, communicate, interrogate and disseminate art. The symposium includes presentations on AI in art making, accessibility systems for performances, audience engagement, and the Creating in the Age of AI panel on the shifting value of authorship, process and meaning in the age of AI. The symposium will include a special presentation of AI and the Moving Body, a collaboration between Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts and Google Creative Lab. This event is made possible in partnership with the Carnegie Mellon University's Master of Arts Management Program and the Arts Management & Technology Laboratory, Machine Learning Department at the School of Computer Science, and the Miller ICA.

The ACT Labs NYC/Live Ideas 2019 two-day HACK-ART-THON and fellowship pairs up to 10 teams, one artist and one AI technologist, that are carefully selected and matched by application only. The fellows will work on prototypes of art x technology projects that raise awareness or contribute to a concrete solution for Breaking the Stigma around Mental Illness. The projects, ranging from performances and interactive art pieces to apps, must use some form of AI technology. Mentors from the fields of technology, art/activism, mental health, PR and presentation will advise the Fellows throughout the process. The prototypes will be presented in front of a jury and audience on May 12 at 6pm. The winning team will receive $5000 in grant funding to continue developing the project. Other prizes include year-long mentorship and support, artist residencies, opportunities to present their work and more.

On Saturday, May 11 there will be two Robotics workshops one for Juniors, ages 5 through 7, and a second for Apprentices ages 8 and up. Students will be introduced to robot building and software programming.

For Adults, Maya Man, technologist and Fiver at Google Creative Lab, will lead Machine Learning for Artists on May 12, to demystify machine learning and explore how tools have been and can be used artistically. No prerequisites or prior knowledge is required, open to artists by any definition. Lance Strate, professor of Media Studies and Communications, will lead a class about getting reacquainted with the preeminent media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman's method of questioning technology.

The 2019 Live Ideas Festival is generously supported by Google, with additional support from the Ace Hotel Humanities New York, Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation, and numerous departments at Carnegie Mellon University.

Photo by Tomoya Takeshita

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