WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:11.680 Yes, ladies and gentlemen, dear guests, dear colleagues, I'm very pleased to be speaking with you today 00:00:11.680 --> 00:00:16.600 about a topic that you might not immediately associate with digital innovation, 00:00:16.600 --> 00:00:24.880 or have in mind right away, namely art. Why my team and I are convinced 00:00:24.880 --> 00:00:31.100 that Artistic Intelligence in particular is indispensable to innovative structures, 00:00:31.100 --> 00:00:40.820 and that in digital times, or rather in times of artificial intelligence, there is something to set against it, 00:00:40.820 --> 00:00:49.160 that is what I'd like to talk about today. The foundations for our ato project were 00:00:49.160 --> 00:00:54.320 laid in Karlsruhe, a place that, as we already heard at the start, stands symbolically for 00:00:54.320 --> 00:00:59.780 the meeting of art with science and technology. There is an 00:00:59.780 --> 00:01:04.880 exceptionally high concentration of artists and art schools here, and at the same time the KIT 00:01:04.880 --> 00:01:11.080 as a technology hub. This combination has given Karlsruhe not only the nickname 00:01:11.080 --> 00:01:18.040 California, but also made it a UNESCO City of Media Arts. Institutions like 00:01:18.040 --> 00:01:25.360 the ZKM, where we are meeting today, or the HFG next door, work very closely 00:01:25.360 --> 00:01:31.960 with technology and with science, drawing on their focus and their media-art background. They are 00:01:31.960 --> 00:01:39.560 interwoven with one another. In this context people often speak of Art and Science or Art and Technology. 00:01:39.560 --> 00:01:46.880 What is meant are artists who do research in scientific contexts, or institutes that make art or 00:01:46.880 --> 00:01:50.120 technical innovations visible in exhibitions. 00:01:50.120 --> 00:02:04.520 And yes, that is important, but mostly it's about illustrating technology rather than genuine collaboration on equal terms. 00:02:04.520 --> 00:02:11.840 Over the past few centuries you could almost say art and science have rarely been seen as two sides of the same coin 00:02:11.840 --> 00:02:18.760 any more. What we have observed in over twelve years of experience, and keep noticing again and again in countless 00:02:18.760 --> 00:02:26.240 interviews we've conducted, is that different kinds of expertise rarely come together, and I don't just mean 00:02:26.240 --> 00:02:32.240 art and science, but the most varied kinds of expertise, genuinely working as one. 00:02:32.240 --> 00:02:41.000 Instead there are reservations about getting too close, the worry of losing quality, or the feeling of being merely a service provider to the other 00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:52.240 discipline or sector. Art often isn't taken seriously. Its positive influence on other sectors goes unrecognised, the lobby is simply too small. 00:02:52.240 --> 00:03:01.240 What's missing is an active role for art and culture in decision-making and in transfer and innovation processes. 00:03:01.240 --> 00:03:11.240 So we don't want to see art only as an accompaniment, but really to understand it as an equal discipline that works together with science, with technology, 00:03:11.240 --> 00:03:21.240 with administration, urban planning, with architecture. That means making knowledge tangible physically and through the senses. 00:03:21.240 --> 00:03:26.240 And only then setting multidirectional learning processes in motion. 00:03:26.240 --> 00:03:36.240 Real innovation doesn't come from isolated expertise alone, but from the interplay of different disciplines. 00:03:36.240 --> 00:03:44.240 The creative and the inquisitive can together unfold a force that goes far beyond what's expected. 00:03:44.240 --> 00:03:49.240 A rather unwieldy term plays quite a central role here: serendipity. 00:03:49.240 --> 00:03:55.240 I chose the English word, because in German it's even more complicated. There you'd talk about Serendipidität. 00:03:55.240 --> 00:04:03.240 Serendipity describes chance discoveries that turn out to be valuable or innovative. 00:04:03.240 --> 00:04:10.240 Those moments where disruption, detours or chance suddenly lead to insight. 00:04:10.240 --> 00:04:15.240 A very well-known example: millions of people have seen an apple fall. 00:04:15.240 --> 00:04:26.240 But only Isaac Newton, back then, had the ability to discover, or invent, gravity from that everyday moment, from that simple observation. 00:04:26.240 --> 00:04:33.240 But discoveries like that need more than a prodigy like Newton, they need very specific conditions. 00:04:33.240 --> 00:04:44.240 He needed prior knowledge, he needed curiosity, he needed time to reflect and the will to think beyond the obvious. 00:04:44.240 --> 00:04:50.240 Without time and space for that kind of reflection, no lasting innovation comes about. 00:04:50.240 --> 00:04:53.240 And this is exactly where art comes in. 00:04:53.240 --> 00:05:02.240 It creates the spaces where people can discover the unexpected, allow themselves curiosity and question their routines. 00:05:02.240 --> 00:05:11.240 Studies show, by the way, that quite a few Nobel laureates kept up artistic hobbies, or still do: music, painting, writing. 00:05:11.240 --> 00:05:18.240 And they also stress how much that cultural education shaped their scientific creativity. 00:05:18.240 --> 00:05:28.240 This connection between art and innovation also shows up in what are called the 4K competences, the 4Cs in English. 00:05:28.240 --> 00:05:40.240 Developed twenty years ago by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, a coalition of Apple, Dell, Microsoft and the US Department of Education. 00:05:40.240 --> 00:05:47.240 And these four Cs stand for the four future competences. 00:05:47.240 --> 00:05:53.240 They are critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration. 00:05:53.240 --> 00:06:06.240 These are exactly the abilities that, in a world shaped by algorithms, preserve what is human, what is empathetic, and reflective thinking that engages the senses. 00:06:06.240 --> 00:06:18.240 It was with these thoughts that we founded ato back then, a network that keeps growing to this day and understands art as an active force for innovation. 00:06:18.240 --> 00:06:34.240 Between 2017 and 2020 we set up an online platform that enables fair, transparent forms of art dealing and supports young art agents in building their own contacts and their own portfolio. 00:06:34.240 --> 00:06:46.240 Here's a little glimpse of the homepage. There you can discover curators, buy art and get to know artists along with the themes and focuses of their work. 00:06:46.240 --> 00:07:02.240 Take, for example, the artist group Francis Karat, who explicitly engage with artificial intelligence as a tool in art and produce works that invite critical thinking but always carry humour too. 00:07:02.240 --> 00:07:08.240 They also recently received the art prize from the Karlsruhe Technology Region. 00:07:10.240 --> 00:07:22.240 Since ato was founded, people from very different backgrounds have worked together: from IT, from robotics, from architecture, business, communication design, art studies, media theory, and the artists themselves. 00:07:22.240 --> 00:07:31.240 Over the course of the process we then pooled these forces into an ideas agency, because we felt it was a shame that art only has one market. 00:07:31.240 --> 00:07:37.240 Namely, selling physical objects. How do you break that open? How can you actually convey ideas and expertise? 00:07:37.240 --> 00:07:41.240 That was exactly our aim. 00:07:41.240 --> 00:07:51.240 From this cross-disciplinary platform, major projects emerged, such as the WERKstattPALAST in 2022, with over 90 events, where topics from 00:07:51.240 --> 00:08:07.240 biodesign, building chemistry, industry, urban planning and art and business were shown in terms of their structures, for instance in a 25-metre-long material library, with very different backgrounds and fields. 00:08:07.240 --> 00:08:11.240 We also developed a quartet card game. 00:08:11.240 --> 00:08:15.240 Here's a section of that material library. 00:08:15.240 --> 00:08:19.240 Here art and concrete meet. 00:08:19.240 --> 00:08:31.240 Here you can see our quartet game again, and here another aerial view of the building we built back then as an open transfer platform in the Karlsruhe Rheinhafen. 00:08:31.240 --> 00:08:43.240 Alongside that, we research on various fronts, in Berlin and Karlsruhe too, including a BMBF project in cooperation with the KIT on agile transfer methods. 00:08:43.240 --> 00:08:50.240 And there the point is to bring Artistic Intelligence into planning processes in a central role. 00:08:50.240 --> 00:09:07.240 And not to see it merely as creativity training, like Design Thinking or other methods, so that we don't make the promise that everyone involved ends up creating art themselves, but rather that each person can have full impact within their own field. 00:09:07.240 --> 00:09:14.240 Here art always sits at the table with the other stakeholders, with the administration and the decision-makers. 00:09:14.240 --> 00:09:23.240 Artistic Intelligence doesn't just complement the artificial kind, it somehow embodies it in a different way too. 00:09:23.240 --> 00:09:38.240 We can understand artistic forms as a critical and physically grounded kind of knowledge, one that stands opposite the disembodied rationality of AI as we know it today, that is, artificial intelligence. 00:09:38.240 --> 00:09:48.240 It can't be programmed, this Artistic Intelligence, it arises from working with material, with the senses and with uncertainties. 00:09:48.240 --> 00:09:55.240 While AI recognises patterns, as we've often heard today, Artistic Intelligence recognises meaning. 00:09:55.240 --> 00:10:00.240 It brings the body, the feeling and the thinking back together. 00:10:00.240 --> 00:10:21.240 A current example, which we already heard about at the start, is our work Flora Momentum, which you can see behind me, an interdisciplinary installation by ato, and also by the artist Hannah Cooke, Jannik Lang and myself, commissioned by the city of Karlsruhe. 00:10:21.240 --> 00:10:37.340 The starting point, as you can see, was an unremarkable, rather unloved spot in the middle of the city centre, a thoroughfare that's fairly central but had hardly any appeal as a place to linger, and that many people tended to avoid, especially at night. 00:10:38.240 --> 00:10:52.240 The task was to develop a kind of guiding vision, but also to create a place to dwell and to enter into a dialogue with the immediate surroundings, including the Karl Apotheke right next door. 00:10:54.240 --> 00:10:58.240 So we wanted to rethink exactly this place as a team, across disciplines. 00:10:59.240 --> 00:11:11.240 And as a first step, the artist Hannah Cooke used artificial intelligence to create various visionary post-botanical plants from medicinal plants such as ginkgo, garlic or turmeric. 00:11:13.240 --> 00:11:21.240 The starting point was an engagement with natural medicine, which she then linked with various plants and human organ structures. 00:11:22.240 --> 00:11:39.340 Together with Jannik Lang, from a different field, product design and urban planning, we then began to take these plant forms and models apart using yet another program and to create free forms from them, 00:11:39.740 --> 00:11:45.660 which could finally be turned into sculptural furniture, that is, steel sculptures. 00:11:46.940 --> 00:12:00.640 Here you can see one of the results. We set in lenticular images, which means, you may know this from wiggle pictures, as you walk past the work the whole image moves and the plant takes root without needing a power socket. 00:12:01.900 --> 00:12:12.800 And so a place of encounter, of movement and of reflection came about, a real example that illustrates rather well the joint effect of AI and AI, 00:12:12.800 --> 00:12:21.460 that is, of artificial and Artistic Intelligence. And without that Artistic Intelligence the project would simply have remained a collection of data. 00:12:22.160 --> 00:12:27.060 Only through it did it become a physical experience, a place that brings people together. 00:12:27.740 --> 00:12:34.800 And today I'll close again with the place where we began, Karlsruhe, because the work underlines rather well that 00:12:35.220 --> 00:12:43.440 if today we think of artificial and Artistic Intelligence not against each other but with each other, 00:12:44.040 --> 00:12:50.940 then innovation and sustainability come about, and in the best case a digital future that is not only resilient, 00:12:51.340 --> 00:12:55.640 but also intelligent and human. Thank you for your attention.