Taken by Artificial Surprise

About

Jeanette Andrews presents a performance and installation series exploring the relationships between magic, machine learning, and surprise. It welcomes attendees to step inside a thought experiment – a Turing Test of sorts. The performance aspect of this work highlights historic pieces of magic presented alongside magic developed with the help of AI with varying levels of surprise, and participants might find themselves a bit unsure as to which may be which. 

In 1950, pioneering mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing wrote the seminal paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." He drew inspiration from Victorian-era parlor games to imagine his own parlor-style amusement, the imitation game. This inspired the now-famous Turing Test and utilized the question, "can a machine take us by surprise?" as a way to investigate artificial / computational intelligence. Taken by Artificial Surprise explores historic parlor magic to examine hierarchies of surprise and the human creation of surprise as compared and contrasted to that of machines. What might performances of the seemingly impossible demonstrate about the capabilities and limitations of both machine learning and the human mind?  Andrews invites participants to think about what constitutes the experience of surprise itself and whether surprise is a unique, defining factor of human consciousness. The work also highlights how the mechanisms to create surprise lie deep within the gaps of lived and learned experience and are perhaps made using the ontological commitments and sense data of robust personal and cultural experiences. The work may also provoke questions as to whether a computer or a human is capable of producing more surprising results. Andrews also notes that, “this project was inspired by my time as an Affiliate at metaLAB (at) Harvard. During this time I was fortunate to have encountered a diversity of ideas and research, and discourse with metaLAB members also greatly assisted the ideation process.” This work is made possible by Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.