FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS
A Eurac Research project in collaboration with Festival Transart
⋙ HUMANITY IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - DAY 1 ⋘
www.futurologicalcongress.it
All events are both at NOI TECHPARK and ONLINE!
Here worlds meet. The Futurological Congress is an interdisciplinary infotainment festival where science and art, technology and culture, online and offline, come together. Dealing with future issues requires all disciplines. All the more fitting therefore is the duo of organizers, consisting of Eurac Research's Center for Advanced Studies, which since its foundation has been dealing with questions of the future across disciplinary boundaries, and the festival of contemporary culture, Transart. The main theme will be “Artificial Intelligence and Art”: philosophers, futurologists, performance artists and media scientists, computer scientists, musicians and publicists will venture a groundbreaking look at the future of human creativity and the astounding possibilities offered by the digital age - a colorful series of scientific keynotes, discussions and art performances, partly physical in the NOI Techpark, partly live-streamed.
Artificial intelligence, robotics and algorithms accompany human everyday life like no other development of the 21st century. They wage wars, handle money flows, make diagnoses, decide on the granting of loans and shape mobility. AI software blurs the line between man and machine. But can artificial intelligence create art? Does it remain just a tool, like a painter's brush, or can it develop its own aesthetics? And what other difference is there between man and machine - perhaps the inevitable transience of humans, compared to the possibility of the quasi-immortal existence of artificial intelligence? These and other questions will be discussed, among others, by the philosopher Julian Nida-Rümelin, the transhumanist Zoltan Istvan, the Google X engineer Grace C. Young, media artists Hexorcismos and Robin Meier, the musician Peter Kirn and the artistic curator Natalia Fuchs.
PROGRAM
SEMINAR 1
17.30 - 17.50 Opening speech from the Arctic by Riccardo Manzotti, philosopher (Italy). “Being conscious without being alive: AI, mind, and life”
17.50 – 18.00 • Opening of the congress by Roland Psenner, President at Eurac Research (Italy), and Knut Weber, artistic director at Stadttheater Ingolstadt (Germany)
18.00 – 18.20 • ALONE, Asalute from Ingolstadt with Mira Fajfer actress, and Stefano di Buduo, video artist (Germany)
18.20 – 19.00 • Digital humanism, Julian Nida-Rümelin, philosopher (Germany)
19.00 – 19.40 • Immortality or bust, Zoltan Istvan, transhumanist (USA)
Dinner/Appetitive Break at Noisteria
20.15 – 20.45
SEMINAR 2
Transfiguration
AV Performance by HEXORCISMOS (Mexico/Germany) & Isabella Salas (Mexico/Canada)
HEXORCISMOS (MX/DE) will present AV live performance in collaboration with Isabella Salas (MX/CAN) as visual / transmedia layer creation. Musically this work is based on the album “Transfiguration”, the first full-length album from Hexorcismos's ongoing research focused on Artificial Intelligence for raw audio synthesis. The work revolves around the idea of transfiguration, approaching the Neural Network as an alchemical technology for distillation of styles. “Transfiguration” treats the GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) as a kind of homunculus able to morph one sound design aesthetic into another, while preserving the audio input's cadence and long-form structure.
20.45 – 21.45
SEMINAR 1
AI, Alien life and the future of the mind
Susan Schneider, NASA-Baruch Blumberg Chair, Library of the Congress and NASA
Augmented intelligence: How machines and humans co-create
Matthias Röder, Co-Founder of Sonophilia & The Mindshift / CEO Karajan Institute (Germany)
Living & working in the ocean
Grace Young, engineer at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory (USA)
21.45 – 22.30
SEMINAR 1
Humanity in the age of Artificial Intelligence
Discussion with: Julian Nida-Rümelin (Germany), Zoltan Istvan (USA), Grace Young (USA), Stefan Brandt (Germany), Knut Weber (Germany).
Moderated by: Harald Pechlaner, Head of the Center for Advanced Studies, Eurac Research (Italy)
22.30 – 23.00
SEMINAR 2
Transfiguration
AV Performance by HEXORCISMOS (Mexico/Germany) & Isabella Salas (Mexico/Canada)
21.30 – 23.00
PIAZZA NOI TECHPARK
Imental Music Tape
Sound Installation by Symphocat (Russia)
Looking to the stars from deck chairs
Download the complete program here ▶︎ bit.ly/FuturologicalCongress