Summer course Art & AI
Program:
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Since the legendary Dartmouth Summer Research Project, which marked the official birth of the field of artificial intelligence in 1957, the development of AI has been a journey full of unexpected twists and turns. It is a story with as many AI summers as there have been AI winters. Recent breakthroughs due to highly improved computational power and optimalisation of algorithms have seen numerous unprecedented and groundbreaking applications. New AI systems and software are introduced on a daily basis and used at an exponential rate. From ChatGPT4, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, Sora, MusicLM, MusicNet to open-source libraries and systems such as TensorFlow, Keras or PyTorch; they all show impressive results and an even more impressive future ahead. It is an evolution which is poised to have an everlasting impact on practically all artistic disciplines.
But as fast as these new tools are being used, their development is not completely unexpected. Most AI techniques are based on principles and techniques with roots in information theory, mathematics and data science. One of the goals in this course is to give an insight into these fundamental techniques and methods from a layman’s perspective. In this way the summer course will provide you with a bottom up and deeper conceptual understanding of the various AI models and systems. As such it will also enable you to incorporate AI in a meaningful and effective manner in your own artistic practice.
This summer course is intended for artists and creative minds alike. No previous knowledge is required. You also do not need to have coding experience to follow this course.
This workshop is hosted and organized by the Center-MCS (Center for Music, Coding and Sound Design). Check out more on Center-MCS and get the latest updates via our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/centermcs .
On a practical side the workshop is organized into three sessions:
Sesssion 1: (28/06 : 18u30 – 21u30)
In this first session you learn to get acquainted with the basic principles and key concepts of AI and it’s usage in the artistic domain.
Concrete program:
-Foundations of AI
- Origins of AI and Art and AI
- Subfields in AI
- Forms of (A)I
- Limitations of AI
-Key concepts in AI (Part I)
- Learning strategies
- AI and data
- Fundamental principles of (artificial) neural networks (ANN) and Deep Learning
- Gradient descent algorithm
Session 2: (29/06: 10u00 – 17u00)
The second day of the summer course we’ll dive further into the key concepts used in AI and how to design and setup your own AI systems. This will be followed by applying this knowledge to the domain of music and sound art using MaxMSP.
-Key concepts in AI (Part II)
- ANN’s and Deep Learning in artistic context
- Understanding the mechanisms behind Generative AI (Generative Adversarial Networks, GAN)
-How to design and use custom AI systems
- Design of use problem
- Data management
- Choice/design of AI algorithms/model
- Model training and testing
- Real world model application and model fine tuning
-Practice Session 1: AI applications in music and sound (art)
Sesssion 3: (30/06: 10u00 – 17u00)
For the third day of the workshop we’ll be covering topics related to ethics, copyright, authorship and responsible use of AI in artistic context. This will be followed by a practical session focusing on the domains of visuals and multimedia art.
-Implications of AI for the arts
- Ethics of AI
- Authorship, copyright and AI
- Future of (human) creativity
- Democratization of AI
- Building responsible AI systems for artistic practices
-Practice Session 2: AI applications in visual and multimedia art
Requirements:
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This summer course does not require any previous coding or sceintific knowledge. All techniques and principles will be explained from the start. You’ll need a laptop to follow this course. As to software we’ll be using open-source software Python and free libraries, Google Colab and MaxMSP. As to MaxMSP you can follow this course using a demo version of this software.
Planning and duration of the summer course:
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20 hours in total. This 3 day summer course runs from on 28/06 and 30/06/2024, on 28/06 from 19u30 to 21u30 and on 29/06 and 30/06 from 10u00 to 17u00.
Cost of this summer course:
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Regular ticket: 165 €
Student ticket (*): 130 €
A maximum of 10 participants can join this workshop
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(*) For a student ticket please contact us via workshops@valeryvermeulen.net and include a scan of a valid proof of student enrollment. Upon validation of the proof of enrollment you’ll receive a discount code that you can use when purchasing your ticket. Students from a University or a University College are eligible for student price.
Enrollment / additional info:
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You can enroll via the following eventbrite link:
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-If you would like to have more info on this summer course please send an email to info@valeryvermeulen.net.
If you would like to be kept up to date about this and similar courses/workshops you can follow the FB page of Center-MCS via https://www.facebook.com/centermcs/, connect via instagram via https://www.instagram.com/valeryvermeulen.studio/ or enroll into our newsletter via this link.