Skip to main content
Ingenium Logo

You are leaving IngeniumCanada.org

✖


This link leads to an external website that Ingenium does not control. Please read the third-party’s privacy policies before entering personal information or conducting a transaction on their site.

Have questions? Review our Privacy Statement

Vous quittez IngeniumCanada.org

✖


Ce lien mène à un site Web externe qu'Ingenium ne contrôle pas. Veuillez lire les politiques de confidentialité des tiers avant de partager des renseignements personnels ou d'effectuer une transaction sur leur site.

Questions? Consultez notre Énoncé de confidentialité

Ingenium The Channel

Langue

  • Français
Search Toggle

Menu des liens rapides

  • Ingenium Locations
  • Shop
  • Donate
  • Join
Menu

Main Navigation

  • Browse
    • Categories
    • Media Types
    • Boards
    • Featured Stories
  • About
    • About The Channel
    • Content Partners

Art to Critically Examine AI & Robotics

Share
4 m
Oct 14, 2022
Categories
Arts & Design
Categories
Computing
Engineering & Technology
Media
Article
Profile picture for user Chantal Rodier
By: Chantal Rodier
University of Ottawa, and adjunct curator with Ingenium
Colourful Eckert IV map projection generated by AI
Photo Credit
Canadian Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Ethical Design Lab (CRAiEDL), University of Ottawa
Eckert IV map projection generated by AI using inputs of vast data, including ethical concepts, contradictions, and images of landscapes

Art offers a unique lens through which to critically examine the technology we build, and (re)evaluate its meaning and function in the world. In the spirit of research-creation, the following two projects bring together emerging artists, engineers, ethicists, academics, and makers—as The CRAiEDL STEAM Collective—to interrogate both the various impacts robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are having on society, and the various ways that the arts and humanities can function as core to the practice of responsible innovation.

These two projects are presented as artworks, but the methodology used to develop them involved regular critical conversations among members of The CRAiEDL STEAM Collective. Those conversations were intended to continually challenge each member’s pre-existing disciplinary assumptions about the potential for “outsiders” to shape their core disciplinary work, be it creating art, making ethical arguments, or designing robotics and/or AI. The result was a reconfiguring of each member’s understanding of the potential for STEAM to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries to produce a new type of expertise (i.e. STEAM expertise) and knowledge (e.g. a critical STEAM-informed perspective on voice-based AI assistants, in the case of I’m Honoured To Serve).

The CRAiEDL STEAM Collective invites you to experience these two artworks while asking yourself how they might challenge your pre-existing understanding of the topics and technologies they interrogate, but also your assumptions about the artificial boundaries that tend to get drawn between art production and technology production.
 

Calibrating Stretched Transparency explores some of the logic, processes, and tools that decision makers use to support their decision-making in large-scale technopolitical climate projects like geoengineering—the (re)engineering of the global climate. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and mapping tools, we highlight some of the biases inherent to these tools which in turn covertly influence the decision makers using them.

Learn more about Calibrating Stretched Transparency by exploring its website here.

I’m Honoured To Serve explores the insidious guise of digital environments made to generate user data in a way to profit from the unsuspecting user. With the permeation of artificial intelligence (AI), we have become complacent in volunteering our labour or personal data in exchange for free tools and functionality.  Through this multi-media installation, we attempt to make visible the implicit conventions that are imposed on users and the level of design involved in seducing the user in giving out unpaid labor and data.

Learn more about I’m Honoured To Serve by exploring this project’s website here. 


Enjoying the Ingenium Channel? Help us improve your experience with a short survey!

Share your insights
Tags
STEAM, design, artificial intelligence
Author(s)
Profile picture for user Chantal Rodier
Chantal Rodier

Chantal Rodier is the STEAM Project Coordinator and Artist-in -Residence at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Ottawa in Canada. She teaches courses on STEAM design, visual literacy, creativity, and innovation, that bring students from Arts and STEM together in project-based learning environments.

With formal training in mathematics, computer science, visual arts, and arts management, she has been incorporating art, human experience, and technology all along her career. More recently, she brings STEAM approaches to her roles as research fellow and adjunct curator with Ingenium. Chantal is member-researcher of The Canadian Robotics and AI Ethical Design Lab (CRAiEDL.ca), and founding member of the Human Centred Innovation Lab (HCIL) at the University of Ottawa.

Related Stories

A dirty glass slide of a stromatolite with a dirty cotton swab at the bottom; a close-up on a bee with a green head and thorax on a yellow flower; a false colour 3D view of the surface of Venus showing volcanoes and lava flowing towards the foreground.

3 Things you should know about how native bees are important pollinators, how saliva is used to clean artifacts, and active volcanism on Venus

A close up of prison bars through which a hallway can be seen.

Captive Labour

Tracey-Mae Chambers stands under her art installation made of red and orange yarns at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum.

Métis artist uses art to encourage conversations about decolonization

A large impact crater viewed from the rim, a woodern spoon full of small yellow grains, a close up of a forearm being tattooed.

3 things you should know about the untapped potential of millet, the permanence of tattoos, and asteroid airbursts

A bushplane, the de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver, on display at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. A new text panel sits in front of the aircraft: a gray structure with wood-tone side panels and dark metal legs. Its backlit surface presents the name of the aircraft, a selection of images, and interpretive texts. A life-size display of a dock sits to the right, followed by another aircraft and panel.

Whispering Loudly: An Update about the “Quiet Updates”

A photograph of the large, multicoloured and multimedia Northern Lights mural.

"Northern Lights" 3-D Mural: A Colourful Artistic Tribute to Canada’s Jet Age Beginnings

The Shell By-Plane X 100 Astroterramare of Professor Septimus Urge (far right), Pleasure Gardens of the Festival of Britain, Battersea Park, London, England. Anon., “New British Jet Unique, but Not Matchless.” Aviation Week, 18 August 1952, 44.

Heath Robinson / Rube Goldberg machines that Heath Robinson and “Rube” Goldberg themselves would have approved of; Or, The wonderful world of Frederick Rowland Emett and his things

Sophie working with a series of toaster artifacts placed on a worktable.

A Toast to the Collection: The History of Toasters in Canada

A typical Tillson Company Limited advertisement. Anon. “Tillson Company Limited.” The Canadian Grocer & General Storekeeper, 13 May 1892, 19.

“A Food, not a Fad:” The life and times of Edwin Delevan Tillson of Tillsonburg, Ontario

A painting depicts a castle-like building at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

Living in two worlds: Celebrating the Park Car Murals

A woman is silhouetted in front of a circular, glowing showcase presenting the Koenig Sound Analyser. The title, “Seeing Sound” is visible on the wall.

Mind the gap: The positive impact of multi-sensory experiences

An acrylic harp on a table being played while two spectators watch.

Music meets technology: Raising the bar

Footer

About The Channel

The Channel

Contact Us

Ingenium
P.O. Box 9724, Station T
Ottawa ON K1G 5A3
Canada

613-991-3044
1-866-442-4416
contact@IngeniumCanada.org
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Channel

    • Channel Home
    • About the Channel
    • Content Partners
  • Visit

    • Online Resources for Science at Home
    • Canada Agriculture and Food Museum
    • Canada Aviation and Space Museum
    • Canada Science and Technology Museum
    • Ingenium Centre
  • Ingenium

    • Ingenium Home
    • About Ingenium
    • The Foundation
  • For Media

    • Newsroom
    • Awards

Connect with us

Subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest Ingenium news straight to your inbox!

Sign Up

Legal Bits

Ingenium Privacy Statement

© 2023 Ingenium

Symbol of the Government of Canada
  • Browse
    • Categories
    • Media Types
    • Boards
    • Featured Stories
  • About
    • About The Channel
    • Content Partners