Last summer we began supporting a wider programme of activity exploring intelligence. From the creative industries to wider public consciousness, artificial intelligence (AI) was everywhere with no sign of slowing. At the time there were many conversations, and the starting threads of ideas ran in parallel to one another, yet they all converged on a single dominant theme.

Our attention was focussed on how AI is part of a wider conversation on intelligence, creativity and labour. As we embarked on this specific theme, we weren’t sure what might emerge, yet excited for what might come of collective conversations, investigations and prototyping.

This September Watershed is thrilled to share a body of creative works shaped within our year-long exploration of intelligence.

Visits and talks

Throughout the year, our Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talks have explored intelligence from a host of different directions: What are the limits to communication with non-human intelligences? How are the creative industries responding to the rise of generative AI? Is ChatGPT really “intelligent”, or is it just faking? And why do so many people talk about AI like it’s a sort of god?

Last autumn we played host to the Canadian art collective UKAI Projects, who shared their work on building resilient cultural platforms in the face of ecological and political volatility. The Kolobok invited participants into conversation with an AI-driven ‘agent’ trained on the experiences, assumptions, cosmologies, hopes, and fears of a physical site, a community, and/or a work of art, while AI Rituals invited players to imagine rituals as ways of making a home in the world (with the guidance of an extremely unhelpful AI!).

Residencies

Our Winter Residencies this year explored two divergent approaches to questions around how intelligence and voice are rooted in place:

Liverpool based artist Dave Evans shared Investigating a Domestic Vocal System, a new artwork building on his practice around sonification — using non-verbal sound to communicate data — and live-streaming, to explore how spaces can be given 'voice'. This project raised questions around audibility, who or what is allowed to make noise, and how live-streaming potentially offers an opportunity to disrupt these conventions.

At the same time Elinor Lower, a Bristol based writer, theatre-maker and participatory artist developed we meet in the woods, a place-based multiplayer theatrical game exploring forest intelligence and the ways in which tactile technology such as vibration or sensors embedded in the landscape, can remind us of the parts of ourselves we have forgotten.

We were also able to support a longer residency through the Patterns in Practice research project with UWE Bristol and the University of Sheffield. We invited composer, improvising guitarist and sound artist Craig Scott to work with us alongside academic research teams exploring how human beliefs, values and feelings affect how we engage with data mining and machine learning. Craig’s project, Improvised Human Machine Conversations, used machine learning and curated data sets to partially control a guitar while it is played by an improvising musician.

In August we brought together 8 young creative technologists to the Make Shift Camp with the theme ‘Artificial Ineptitude’. With most AI growing from a capitalist notion of productivity we asked the group to consider what is lost in these processes and how might we create whimsical experiences that celebrate ineptitude and inefficiency. After 5 days of thinking and making the group prototyped 3 playful experiences, some of which are returning in our September First Friday.

Sandbox

Watershed, in partnership with MyWorld, commissioned 6 new AI prototypes that creatively and critically engage in ways of working with artificial intelligence and diverse networks of intelligence. 

We jump into the year 2084 and meet Glory Mold, part slime mold, part AI. A speculative fiction installation and workshop model from Produced Moon and Studio Areté, Glory Mold is an investigation of alternate intelligences. Featuring an interactive AI character influenced by real-time organic data, as well as artefacts from our imagined future, it playfully challenges us to reimagine relationships and interconnectedness of AI, humans and the living world. 

Roll dice with *CripShip and undertake a case for the Ministry of AI Spill. Led by artist and technologist, Joseph Wilk, CripShip is a roleplaying game where disability saves society from big tech, where play teaches resisting and breaking AI in the real world.

By making visible the inherent bias and prejudice constantly replicated in these systems, and inverting techno- solutionism, Crip Ship’s starting point is that disability could save society from technology.

*Crip is a term that we, along with some of our community, have reclaimed through disability scholarship, culture and activism.

Pyka, based in Wales, present The Conductor. An AI embedded within their Expression Orchestra, who sits at the center of the experience, capable of interpreting human interaction resulting in a richer musical expression for all. The orchestra is a collection of alternative easy to use digital instruments designed to empower and broaden peoples’ access to musical performance. 

the apothecary network centre collective care and a joyful connection with nature honouring our ancestral knowledge and intuitive practices and are using creative tech to share knowledge to grow decolonial community apothecaries. The Uppsetter are prototyping a low-tech webapp that is designed to be a meeting place between plants and people built on a radically small AI robot powered by the sun.

Kinship Wayfinder, led by Surfing Light Beams, is a playful, forest experience where teams explore, share and connect with the environment and each other to discover the fate of a group of dendrologists, who mysteriously vanished whilst on the hunt for the fabled Methuselah, the planet’s oldest tree whose rings hold critical information about the future of the earth's climate. AI is the team’s key collaborator in the design and build of the experience but also the deliverer of the experience’s final narrative reveal.

Continuing to reimagine the development of artificial intelligence we encounter a (re)imitation of life, a collaboration between Studio Playfool and Domenica Landin. Inspired by cyberneticist William Grey Walter and his infamous tortoises, their project proposes situating AI, represented by an LLM, into an artificial tortoise body to explore a non-human perspective. Their prototype invites us to step into the habitat of these speculative creatures. 

The six prototypes were developed as part of More than AI Sandbox, a creative research and development programme where cohorts of brilliant people transform an experimental idea into a working prototype over a short period of time. The prototypes will be showcased to the public Fri 20 Sept here at Watershed. 

In September

Over the course of September, we’re going to be sharing back some of this work, giving you the chance to join our conversations.

Our regular First Friday social event will be back on Fri 6 Sept with a double-sized edition, showcasing some of the more playful projects from this year, including self-playing guitars, an AI-driven lemonade stand, and speculations on the future of radio.

Throughout the month, our Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talks are following the Other Mind’s theme of exploring intelligence and AI. There’s a chance to hear from international guests Itsuki Doi and Takehide Yoshida from the Takashi Ikegami Laboratory at the University of Tokyo present their latest scientific research and art projects utilizing Alife, and researcher Amina Abbas-Nazari will share their work on how to reveal and resist voice profiling by AI.

Writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle will be joining us for a guest talk. James supported our artists in residence and Sandbox teams through advisory sessions and now present’s their exploration of intelligence and technology.

Our cinema programme will explore representations of mechanical or artificial intelligence on screen. Over five Sundays, we’ll be showing a range of science fiction from the last 15 years, each meditating on what it means to be human, and opening up the possibilities of mechanical consciousness.

Ranging from mysteries and thrillers (Moon, Ex Machina) to thoughtful dramas (Her, After Yang) and even leaning into rom-com territory with Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man, this season offers a variety of takes on these ‘Other Minds’ and digs into what they reveal about our own identity and consciousness.

More Than AI Sandbox Showcase

After months of research and development, the six commissioned Sandbox teams publicly share their new prototypes for the first time. A fitting finale for our year of exploring different kinds of intelligence. 

Sandbox supports experimental and speculative ideas; it is a supported space to test new ideas with generosity and rigour. The teams selected present new experimental and innovative ideas as to how we can collaborate and work differently with AI rather than using it purely as a tool for productivity or efficiency.

Each team will show their early-stage prototype across Watershed Thu 19 – Fri 20 Sept (with the Public Showcase on Fri 20 Sept). Expect to become part of a new digital ensemble, experience a new solar powered meeting point between plants and people, be immersed in the year 2089, step into a robot’s habitat, encounter The Ministry of AI Spill, and create moments with a forest.

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