A new exhibit opens at the National Liberty Museum this weekend, and it couldn’t be more timely.
Data Nation: Democracy in the Age of AI, encourages guests to reflect on how the technology they use every day makes them a node in the evolving landscape of data governance, the development of artificial intelligence and our rights as digital citizens .
Liberty is a complicated notion, often in tension with other ideals such as equality and safety, said Alaine Arnott, CEO of the National Liberty Museums, at a reception opening the exhibit.
On view through October 30 at the museum near 3rd and Chestnut in Old City, the exhibit was created in collaboration with Landau Design+Technology and the UArts Center for Immersive Media, featuring artists from Philadelphia and members of Vox Populi, an artist – manage a space for experimental arts.
Part of the museum’s mission is to facilitate constructive dialogues about the theory and practice of freedom, and the new exhibit focuses these conversations on rapidly advancing technology, including emerging controversies surrounding artificial intelligence.
Hopefully, when you go to see it, you’ll come away with a stronger understanding of your role as digital citizens as we ponder the question: What if machines take over? said Arnot. He was only half joking.
Whether or not you live in fear of The Singularity, there’s a lot to engage with at Data Nation, here are three big themes that underpin the experience.
Data takes many forms, as does the art that inspires it
A brief history of data visualization, including the work of WEB Du Bois and Florence Nightingale, shows how data has been variously represented since the mid-1800s.
But two pieces on display extend the concept of data far beyond what you might imagine.
Troxler’s fade, a beacon for the construction of the Moleskin foot as an anthropomorphic tool, is the title of a piece by Jim Strong built on 15 years of research into everyday anomalous electrical interference events, the artist said.
The piece itself is a noise-generating collage hanging in the NLM’s main stairwell, connected to an array of electrical transducers that coat the glass cladding of the stairs.
As you move through the space and touch the railing or glass surround, shifting electrical impulses (read: bioelectrical data) change the noise that’s channeled through the key-like artwork.
Science as a form of alchemy is an important way to engage the world in Strong. It’s been resurrected from daily life, but I’m very interested in science as a home practice just to be aware of what’s going on around you, he told Billy Penn.
Lane Timothy Speidel contributed a piece titled Spontaneous knotting of agitated string, constructed with their passion for needlework in mind.
The work takes its name from an academic paper examining the factors governing the spontaneous formation of various knots even when the rope is left untouched, essentially a game of chance.
The piece features a rope that runs from a can to a large woven wire nest hanging overhead. Alongside this assemblage is a quilted piece that stems from the ways data is represented, with patches depicting datasets and Dadaist graphs alongside tangles of string and drawings.
When it came time to do the show, I was thinking about mundane data, about everyday questions, Speidel said, giving examples like:
- Do you have a butterfly tattoo?
- Do you believe in luck?
- Are you trans?
- How many unpaid bills do you have?
- Are you in a union?
It’s this idea that all of these mundane, everyday events and coincidences could be or probably be related in some way, Speidel said.
As a digital citizen, don’t forget that you are part of a digital political system
Technology has always been political, but the impact of online echo chambers on the terms of their very existence and their utter manipulation, as alleged in the scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica, has made that clearer than ever.
Echo Chamber is also the name of an immersive installation at the center of the exhibition, where viewers can enter a sort of canopy, with walls illuminated by floating text bubbles.
When prompts appear, text bubbles stating a set of initial instructions nearby, visually representing a feedback loop. The task of discerning between different exchanges and confirmation biases is just one interpretation of the bet.
Roopa Vasudevan, media artist and computer programmer, contributed a work to the exhibition called dataDouble.
I’m interested in how we modify and adapt our behavior to the demands of computation and machines, Vasudevan told Billy Penn.
Her work aims to show how our identities are reduced and flattened by data collection and consists of 15 portraits that participants voluntarily sent her as beta testers for a real browser extension that she created and that you can try for yourself.
The extension tracks participants’ browsing history and subtly reshapes their portrait based on how they traverse the web, based on a symbolic code devised by Vasudevan. If you spend more time on news sites, for example, your image becomes more saturated.
Vasudevan also interviewed early adopters after the trial period. To a tee, everyone really understands the issues surrounding data, but it just seems overwhelming, he said. It feels like something they have no agency in.
The exhibit insists on the realization that data is a collective matter, she added, meaning you don’t need to feel alone in understanding how data collection affects your life.
It’s a message that echoes new data governance theories that aim to move away from regulating data as the property of individual users and towards the formation of democratic data institutions.
AI is all the rage right now and the exhibit will remain at the forefront
The exhibition’s subtitle, Democracy in the Age of AI, touches a tipping point in the technology sector. Enthusiasm for AI is inevitable right now, especially after the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model.
The quotes scattered throughout the exhibit are almost all recent, drawn from news and academic articles on AI published this year and from the captions of a blog post by Bill Gates from March.
We began with a desire to do an exhibit specifically on how data knowledge informs our decisions and influences our democracy, said Aaron Billheimer, director of exhibits at the museum. But as we studied, all the AI stuff started coming up, so we answered that and pivoted.
Billheimer and the NLM team plan to adapt the exhibit during its run as more hype, news stories, criticisms, regulations, and AI-related innovations emerge.
If something big happens, there may be a part of this exhibition that we need to rethink, and I think that’s okay, Kelley Stone, exhibition and collections project manager at the NLM, told Billy Penn. We have printing facilities which we have obtained through a grant in our printing studio and this allows us to be really flexible and fluid.
And yes, there are AI-generated portraits in the exhibition, including a viral AI image rendering of Pope Francis, or Pope Puffer as Stone calls it.
Need advice on locating artificially generated work?
Look at the hands, Stone said. The AI doesn’t know how to make hands and they are always wild.
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