Rashin Fahandej has been awarded the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Digital Music and Sound Art for A Father’s Lullaby. The project was incubated as part of Rashin’s residency at Thoughtworks Arts.

The Prix Ars Electronica is the world’s most time-honored award in electronic and interactive art, with prize ceremonies going back more than 30 years, alongside showcases at the famed Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.

Art-A-Hack and BeFantastic have announced a 2021 open call focusing on Singapore, Switzerland, India, Germany, and the United States, with incubation and support from Thoughtworks Arts. Together we are calling for artists, designers, technologists, and others to focus on the pressing issue of global climate crisis.

Exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), as well as data and networks, we aim to connect a diverse group of global practitioners to create collaborative artwork that will amplify voices and responses to the climate emergency.

AIBO (Artificial Intelligent Brainwave Opera) is an emotionally intelligent artificial intelligent brainwave opera. The performance piece follows two characters, Eva, a human performer wearing a bodysuit of light and AIBO, a “sicko” chatbot powered by a GPT-2 AI.

The opera’s spoken word libretto is adapted from the biography of Eva von Braun about her fourteen-year love affair with Adolf Hitler. It is a metaphor for humanity’s infatuations with AI.

During my Synthetic Media residency at Thoughtworks Arts I began developing a new work Birds of the British Empire that explores the linkages between historical, colonial archives and the training sets used in machine learning. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic the residency took place online via various cloud-based tools and servers.

The museum is… not so much the space for the representation of art history as a machine to produce and stage the new art of today—in other words, to produce “today” as such. In this sense, the museum produces, for the first time, the effect of presence, of looking alive.
— Boris Groys, On The New

Working with Thoughtworks developers we used Continuous Integration (CI) techniques to link together and automate our codebases, so that when for example I make changes to one Machine Learning algorithm the whole system can run end-to-end and generate new results.

These types of distributed workflows open up new ways for artists to organize, store and exhibit work.

Thoughtworks Arts and Baltan Laboratories organized the two-week-long online masterclass: Deepfakes - Synthetic Media And Synthesis, led by director Ellen Pearlman and ThoughtWorker Julien Deswaef and facilitated by Leif Czakai of Baltan Labs.

In congruence with the Starts Prize 2020 exhibition held at Bozar this Fall, Bozar Lab organized a webinar on the topic of artist and technologist collaborations as a model for innovation.

Artist and Thoughtworks Arts A.I. resident, Karen Palmer (Storyteller From The Future), presented her immersive film project Perception IO, and shared how it explores the intersection of A.I., bias, policing, and new, innovative forms of storytelling.

Program director Ellen Pearlman moderated The Grid panel Life During (and After) Covid-19 - Artistic Strategies and Breakthrough Responses.

The live panel discussion focused on how the current global pandemic has impacted art institutions, collaborative work, and audience involvement, especially in relation to innovative indy-led network solutions.