Join artists Mohamed Somani & Blaine Campbell at Latitude 53’s new location for shared art-making and playful discovery with hands-on physical media translated into digital images. This hybrid workshop hosted by Blaine and Latitude 53 will bring Mohamed into the space via videoconferencing, as he feeds photographs of collaborative pieces created by in-person participants into their AI computer model, creating new variations.
Pre-registration is encouraged as our capacity is limited as we continue to prepare our new space. Note that our bathroom is located behind some steps, making it not barrier-free—if you anticipate this being an obstacle to your participation please get in touch so we can try to make arrangements to mitigate it.
Patterning is an accessible activity regardless of age and skill that has deep roots across cultures. It is also a way for people to connect in verbal and non-verbal ways—in the moment of the activity but also across geographies and time. Join us in a freeform pattern making workshop where participants create individual or group patterns using various coloured cut geometric mat board shapes. These creations will be augmented by an AI model which will insert a collaborative 'buffer' to connect our creations and create a cohesive, continuous pattern.
Each patterning event yields vastly different visuals that reflect the diversity of the participants. It will be exciting to see what will result from this workshop and we look forward to participant input into the process and visual outcomes.
Research questions: do patterns produced under these conditions have properties that reflect those experiences? What will an ML model trained exclusively on such experiences/patterns ‘behave’ like and how can such a collaborative AI be used to connect people?
Blaine & Mohamed's project, "AI.Craft" is part of our summer-long series exploring the future and histories of noncommercial artist-run centres like Latitude 53.
About the Project
As Latitude 53 approaches our 50th Anniversary in October 2023, we have been thinking about the last 50 years and trying to imagine “What will the next 50 years look like?”
To consider this question, we aim to bring together artists, writers, curators, community members and youth to explore some of the emergent issues that affect our current society.
Our six Lead Artists will be hosting events both in person and online for discussion, creation, research, and experimentation, with invited guest artists and lecturers. We invite our community to join as members of their working groups to consider these questions of futurity.
AI.Craft
In recent months, AI-generated art has triggered a great deal of attention with the general release of Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, and other similar tools. We are interested in what these tools mean to us as artists, their potential impacts on the reception of art and the role of the artist, and how they might be used as means of inspiration and collaboration in visual arts practices.
Initially inspired by the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, we are exploring the use of randomness, pattern making, and AI as a means to connect diverse groups through collaborative play, making the process of artistic creation accessible to audiences that may not think of themselves as “artists”. The basis for this investigation has been the collaborative art-making app “Arpp”.
Blaine Campbell is an Alberta-based artist working in photography, sculpture, and video. Campbell’s thematic interests vary widely and have included landscape theory, mediation and artifice, quantum mechanics, and mathematical patterning. A 2007 graduate of Emily Carr University with a BFA in photography, he previously obtained B.Math (UWaterloo) and M.Sc. (UCalgary) degrees in mathematics. In 2015/16 Campbell completed an artist residency at the TRIUMF particle and nuclear physics lab and in 2017 at the Banff Centre. Most recently he presented the immersive sculpture “Transcendence Engine 2021-a” as part of The Works Art & Design Festival.
Mohamed Somani is an Ottawa-based artist and co-founder of Mobil Art School in Vancouver (2018) which was founded on the belief of creativity as a fundamental human need and right, and is dedicated to broadening public access to art making through collaborative analog and technological methods and art education. Mobil Art was initially a fully 'mobile' concept, providing art classes and history lectures to seniors and other underserved communities, hiring local artists to fill a much needed connection with the communities in which they live. The Mobil concept quickly led to the founding of an actual physical school in May of 2019 in Vancouver's historic Chinatown. Mobil became a place where classes were a mixture of play and creativity, specializing in local artist-hosted 'Drink & Draws', ceramics and painting classes, art talks, and more, being recognized in the 2019 edition of The Georgia Straight's "Best of Vancouver'. Mobil also specialized in creative team building, translating artistically rooted concepts into wider domains, using play-based methods where traditional artistic skills was not a prerequisite.
In 2020, Mobil developed a collaborative iOS drawing app called Arpp, inspired by the surrealist drawing game ‘exquisite corpse’. This has led to an exploration of AI between Mobil Art and Blaine Campbell as a collaborative buffer between people and use of AI as a 'random' input into the creative process.