Despina Papadopoulos

In an environment of extreme quantification, measurability and trackability the human body acquires a mechanistic dimension that strips it from mutuality and its inherent complex relationship to identity, selfhood, sociability, autonomy, fluidity and desire for authentic engagement.

In my research I look at the constituting relationship we have with technology and its material enactements and propose looking at Artificial Intelligence itself as a material that is part of our built and “intra-acting” environment, distributed across all surfaces.  Doing so opens up a space for a 3-fold questioning which will inform how I will then look at intelligence and the ethical implications of the shifting boundaries between human-machine assemblages:

• Redefine what a material is – unfold and expand its properties, engage in a deep questioning of material attributes, variability and potentiality 
• Develop a language and metaphors that provide new models for looking at the world, articulate the values we want to enact, and the way we frame the ethical and techno-social possibilities and implications of artificial intelligence
• Subvert the psychophysical attributions of materials and introduce cognitive dissonances that manifest the fluid, dynamic and constituent ways materials play out in the world

In my practice this takes the form of experimenting and developing hybrid materials and structures that subvert and disrupt our assumptions and anticipatory models of “what things do,” to create a “double-take” and a repositioning of accepted notions of materiality and functionality. 

In a second, but related move, I am looking at the values, language and paradigms we employ when developing technological artefacts and how we then inhabit and get defined by them.  In response, I am working with industry and a network of practitioners and collaborators to develop a new species of algorithmically-driven artefacts that introduce notions of embodiment, serendipity, playfulness and unpredictability, in an attempt to expand our relationship with machines, and ultimately the relationship with our own sense of self and community.