Between October 2012 and January 2013, artists Ben Sadler and Phil Duckworth of Juneau Projects are resident at Pervasive Media Studio, investigating the artistic possibilities of collaborating with ‘thinking’ machines. Watershed's Development Assistant Nicola Richardson asked Phil a few questions about their plans:

Explain to us where Juneau Projects have come from and what sort of work you have been doing up to this point.

Juneau Projects: Ben [Sadler] and I have been working together as Juneau Projects for about 12 years and have been full-time artists since 2005. We met just after we’d finished university when we had both started working together at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham as technicians. Primarily we were talking about the music we liked so we formed a band with two others and did some projects related to sound. The band drifted apart but we found we worked well together and had some ideas about artworks we could try out together. We do a whole mixture of things and work in a range of media so anything from painting, sculpture, animation, installations; we do a lot of sound- or music-based projects as well. We also do exhibitions of our own work as well as a lot of collaborative projects with schools and groups. The themes of what we’ve done have evolved over the past 12 years but a constant element has always been the examination of nature and technology and how these worlds come together and if/how they overlap. A few years ago we were looking at folk art and handicraft and locating our work within that style, whereas more recently we’ve come to look at a science-fiction aesthetic in our work which is actually how our project here at Watershed has come about.

Over the next few months you are going to be looking at how artificial intelligence could be used in your work. Where did this initial interest in AI come from and where are you hoping to take your research during your residency?

Juneau Projects: Leading up to this we were using robot arms to make paintings and out of that we’ve developed an interest in artificial intelligence. It’s something that is frequently used in science fiction as a plot device but often in a very advanced form. The reality is that it’s very limited and rules-based in terms of what people can do with it at the moment. It’s certainly not autonomous intelligence; it’s a set of rules and working within a set of parameters. We used the limitations of the robot arm in the paintings, the way we controlled the arm with a mouse made the paintings a lot more clumsy but it gave them a very different feeling than if we’d done them ourselves. It’s a bit of a tweak to that idea of using computers or machines to do things accurately. I think we’ll probably approach this in the same way: look at the limitations as much as the possibilities. I think we’re looking to use artificial intelligence to either give us ideas, or to make something that’s going to modify the way we create. We know almost nothing about the field at present so this time is initial research and meeting people in the field. It might be that through this research and these ideas, it actually becomes a piece of work where the idea of AI is the subject rather than the way it gets made.

What interested you about the opportunity to be an Artist in Residence at the Pervasive Media Studio?

Juneau Projects: We’ve always had a technological element to a lot of the things that we do but we’re not really trained, so on a number of occasions we’ve worked with coders or programmers to realise those kind of things. Having looked at the setup of the Studio, we thought it looked like a really interesting opportunity to discuss ideas of this kind with people who knew what they were talking about. Also, the opportunity to have a period of funded research time is something that doesn’t happen for us very often. I’d say 90 or 95% of the things that we make are for a specific exhibition or project; we rarely have any speculative time to develop things and see what happens. So the opportunity to have a bit of time, although we are keen to use this time to produce something, wasn’t as pressurised as knowing you had to have something finished for a particular deadline in time for an exhibition. That kind of freedom was really a draw.

Juneau Projects will be tracking the progress of their research throughout their residency. Keep your eyes peeled on their project page to see what they are up to.