So you've covered a couple of the points that I was going to start with, so I'll just briefly introduce some of the things that I'm currently working on. As Manuela mentioned, I'm going to be joining the team of the New Reel at the University of Edinburgh. And the project explores how the design of festival experiences fueled by artificial intelligence can equip cultural organizations to engage audiences in what we call the new real. So the new real has so far commissioned artworks by Jake Elwes, Anna Riddler, and Caroline Sinders, who are all showing work here in the festival. They've also launched a pilot experience called Awen, a walk encountering nature. Our mission with the new reel is to build awareness and understanding of the ways data systems and AI reflect and shape our social reality. To quote the project director director Drew Hemant. So these concerns resonate very much with the work I've done in my PhD and today's presentation and a great deal of my previous work draws from my background in media archaeology. Media archaeology seeks to better understand contemporary media artifacts and contexts in relation to longer historical tendencies that shape and inform them. So for example, we may look at early precursor technologies to those of photography and cinema in order to gain a better understanding of how those are manifested today. For example, in the slide shown here, Abelardo Morel creates and documents rooms that he's turned into camera obscura using an early projection technique that adds to the meaning of the artist's photographs. By adopting what Siegfried Zielinski calls a deep time perspective of media, the approach of media archaeology allows us to draw insights from artifacts from the distant past, in contrast with the common tendency to exclusively consider technology in terms of the new. with the common tendency to exclusively consider technology in terms of the new. Dead media is a term commonly associated with media archaeology and best known for its use in Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project. But I'll note that it's a bit antithetical to my own perspective on media. It mostly refers to antiquated or obsolete technology that's no longer used, such as many devices of pre-cinema, but I've also heard it applied to pretty much anything that no longer feels new. So the tendency to treat technology as if it quickly expires stands out as highly problematic for a number of reasons, including the unsustainable toll this has from an ecological perspective. So I'd like to dig into this a bit and try to unpack technical novelty and its accelerationist tendencies, especially in relation to art contexts. especially in relation to art contexts. Technical novelty may play a significant role in public reception of media and artistic projects, especially those engaged with science and technology. While this is a strategy that often succeeds in quickly gaining notoriety, it doesn't necessarily hold up to the test of time or contribute meaningfully or sustainably to art and discourse. Looking at the history of media and technology, there have been many instances in which the new has been used to mystify technologies or technical processes, often while seeking short-term commercial gains. And while the use of the new itself is not really a new phenomenon, it remains a significant factor, at least in the early phases of cultural explorations with technology. So I'd like to look at a few recent and historic examples of how novelty has been instrumentalized over a longer period. I'll especially focus on instances involving machine learning and the larger narratives around artificial intelligence because of my own research background and the current relevance of those topics. So this is intended as an exploration and a bit of a rough sketch, trying to ground our perspective of the new and how it's used as a tool to sell things, literally or figuratively speaking, and help us reflect critically on what this means in a wider context. So this image, if you can see it, is an example I like quite a lot as an illustration of how changing perceptions of technology and its novelty affect the way that media artifacts are received. It's one of a series of photographs produced by two young girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith, in the early part of the 20th century, known as the Cottingley Fairies Incident. So the photos show the girls interacting with fairies, which the girls had made out of paper. But when these photos were published, they caused a bit of a sensation, and there was at least a degree of public discussion over whether these were indeed genuine. And they notably convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that these photographs were evidence of the existence of fairies. The situation highlights the suspension of disbelief that is often applied to new technologies. So before photography, its processes and its limitations were widely accessible to non-experts, there was more room for people to question their own grasp of what the technology was in fact capable of. And this left even unlikely outcomes like taking photographs of fairies slightly less doubtful than perhaps in other circumstances. And although the Cottingley fairies incident may seem a bit absurd to us today, we may also be able to see that that distinction seems to have been a bit less clear a century ago than it is now. So even though it's quite different, the hype around artificial intelligence and machine learning in recent years also demonstrates how the perceived novelty of a technology can be used as a marketing tool. Searching the internet for images using the term artificial intelligence tends to return a lot of images that look like the one I'm showing on the screen, taking quite a lot of liberties with the mythology that's been built up around AI. So an infamous instance of this is the sale of an image called The Portrait of Edmund de Belmy by the Christie's Auction House in 2018, which they credited to an algorithm rather than the group of people responsible for creating it. The work was widely panned in artistic contexts as a marketing stunt to drive up the price of a picture that lacked artistic merit, yet it sold at auction for far above the expected price. far above the expected price. And this example is already a bit old, but even now I frequently see other examples, even by very respected people, where public lack of understanding of how AI works has been used to push forward fairly dubious projects, especially those pushing the narrative of AI as an autonomous artist. So before we go further into AI and machine learning, I'll just give a quick overview of what I mean by these and some related terms. Artificial intelligence has been defined by prominent researchers in the field as a branch of computer science that studies the properties of intelligence by synthesizing intelligence. And though it's become somewhat synonymous with machine learning, AI is distinguished from it as being a broader field and concept within which machine learning is situated. So to use Melanie Mitchell's definition, which I quite like, machine learning is situated. So to use Melanie Mitchell's definition, which I quite like, machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence in which machines learn from data or their own experiences. AI is also differentiated from AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which according to Wikipedia, is the hypothetical ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can perform. So this is the meaning of AI that's popular to anthropomorphize as threatening to become autonomous and to destroy the world. But many of the problems with this kind of depiction is that one of the many problems of it is that it actually glosses over some of the very real and present dangers of AI that originate from humans and not from the systems themselves. Besides the fact that experts in AI insist that AGI is far from becoming a reality anytime soon, many projects have latched onto this mythologized idea of artificial intelligence and the AI artist as an enduring trope. I would say that Andreas Brockmann has pointed out in his article, The Machine as Artist as Myth, that this idea of the machine artist is actually in itself very far from new. But even beyond this mythologization of machines assuming authorship as artists, there's also quite a lot of work similar to the work of, for example, Mario Klingerman, where sometimes quite underwhelming artworks are made using machine learning, but marketed merely for their association with artificial intelligence. So far from being exclusive to AI, this phenomenon is just a current trend or manifestation comparable to other fads and overhyped trends in art and technology that have occurred in the past. One example of this is the fictions of virtuality from the early days of the internet, which are far less common now and also far less convincing. also far less convincing. And for example, works that have been highly innovative at the time they were created, they may appear quite dated when we look back on them. Another thing I'm quite interested in is artists working with formats, programming languages, or protocols that cease to be widespread, and these bring up other issues, such as how galleries or museums can show archival materials long after they're created, and when it may not be possible to run them in the original manner that they were composed for. Patricia Falcao from the Tate has been doing some really interesting research into this topic and looking at how institutions can archive file-based contemporary artworks. Artists also sometimes work with older formats intentionally to play on this history and and work with the changing meaning of those media. So there's a tradition of discussing art as having a certain timelessness and an ability to touch on something beyond itself that exceeds its particular context. But in what we might call media art or art that not only uses technology but also reflects upon and addresses the technological conditions of its own existence. The techniques and technologies that are employed and the way that those are used often play a significant role in the intended interpretation of the work. So not all technical elements are necessarily integral or meaningful within a work. So while it's actually interesting from an archival point of view, it also raises a lot of difficult to answer philosophical and artistic questions. So we might ask ourselves, for example, which parts of a work can be treated as significant to the meaning of a work, and which may be treated as interchangeable or possible to update with new technology. The answer to this question is often very subjective and open to interpretations of artistic intention, as well as being highly variable from one work to another. So to put all of this in perspective, I'd like to read an anecdote from Laurent Manonis, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, Archaeology of the Cinema. So after the appearance of Magi Naturalis, the science of optics became one of the favorite recreations of nobility and scholars, and one of the most desirable accessories for acrobats and conjurers. So this book was published in 1558 by Giovanni Battista della Porta, and in this book he detailed the optical principles involved in the magic lantern, which became a very, very popular public spectacle. So for the commoners of the 16th century who had not read Magi Naturalis, the sudden projection of a devil or wild animals onto the screen of the camera obscura would remain for some time a phenomenon that was inexplicable and therefore supernatural. A new resource was opened up for quacks and tricksters. Not long after the book's publication, it was possible for an individual initiated into its mystery to profit from the more or less general ignorance of the world at large in optical matters, presenting shows of magic and sorcery, whose sole aim was to extort money from gullible spectators. So to give this a bit of context, according to Manoni, projections and optical toys created a new trade. The peddler or showman, traveling with a magic lantern or peep show, often on their back. It was the trade of paupers generating miserably low earnings. These traveling lanternists moved between towns and villages with their show carried on a back strapped to their back. But while the magic lantern and fraudulent lanternists had their heyday, within a hundred years, the magic lantern had fallen so out of fashion that a prominent inventor wrote the following of his father's requests that he construct his father a magic lantern. Here is another commission which my father has given me to arrange for him a lantern with two or three different kinds of pictures to be shown with it. You would not believe the difficulty with which I occupy myself with such trifles, which already seem quite old to me, and in addition I am shamed that people will know that they came from me. So the speed at which technologies and fads that surround them has accelerated quite drastically since the time that the magic lantern was fashionable. But something that remains similar is the rapid expiration of technological gimmicks. What I mainly want to point out is that relying on the novelty of a technology to prop up, to validate, to legitimize art often ends up being a short-sighted pitfall. So much like the distinction between art, bad art, and non-art, the distinction between using technology in art and attempting to present it as a novelty, as art, or as the justification of art, is a highly subjective and complex to navigate territory. navigate territory. So in this talk I wanted to problematize novelty in media art contexts precisely because I don't think that there are any straightforward answers. Yet it's a very integral issue to technologically engaged art. So I thought I'd end this presentation with a provocation of several open questions that I hope can prompt discussion about more sustainable perspectives on art and technology. When is a new technology just a gimmick? When is it an integral element in a work of art and what comes after novelty. Thank you. Thank you, Mary.