Art and culture might seem out-of-place at a tech conference… but MozFest isn’t your usual tech conference. We know insight and innovation spark where art, culture, technology and activism converge: from its inception, art has been part of the Mozilla Festival. Join us this year at MozFest, 21–27 October in London for a unique Arts & Culture Experience.
In 2019, the Arts & Culture Experience aims to harness the creative power of the web — from maker communities to web-native art, from online inspiration to digital design — to fight for a healthy internet. We’ve invited practitioners of art and cultural heritage to explore how creativity can shape emerging technologies, like Artificial Intelligence, for the better.
What are artistic and poetic ways to highlight the risks, challenges, and fears around AI, as well as our hopes and dreams for AI? How might this technology act across our societies now and in the near future — in both our public, communal spheres, and in our most intimate, private spaces?
In sessions across the themed Spaces, and in our exhibition space on the Mezzanine level, and in a new offering on the 8th floor we’re calling the Arts & Culture Salon, you’ll encounter artworks, ideas, and conversations that are poetic, provocative, experimental and experiential.
Included in the exhibition are a participatory work by the future-forward London-based Comuzi interaction design studio; Us Aggregated, 3.0, a video installation by Nigerian-American artist and researcher Mimi Onuoha, whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection; and an intervention by resident artist Elvia Vasconcelos, a design researcher, wannabe hacktivist, compulsive drawer, and dressmaker. You’ll have a chance to engage with Mozilla Fellow Noah Levenson’s Stealing Ur Feelings, an playful and disturbing augmented reality experience about the power of facial emotion recognition AI.
The exhibition extends into the Arts & Culture Salon, a comfortable gathering space for people with a common interest in open forms of creativity. Among the artworks installed in the Salon is Tom Schofield’s Accession, a work custom-made for MozFest. Accession is a collecting booth for an imaginary museum regulated entirely by AI, where you’re invited to submit an everyday object to the collection. These objects are photographed, classified, and evaluated by AI processes, which evolve and become more selective as the AI learns from the collection.
The Arts & Culture Salon also features show-and-tell demonstrations of open art and culture projects and participatory sessions critically reflecting on the collaborative practice of collecting and preserving art and culture. Included in this rich program of thought-provoking, participatory sessions is “Sing for Your Data Rights,” with digital rights activist and former Mozilla Fellow Valentina Pavel. In this beginner-friendly, collaborative songwriting session, the subject matter is participants’ online challenges and fears, and their dreams of a better digital future. In “Decolonising Tibet: Digitisation, Translation, Communication” led by Georgina Doji, participants explore the ways technology and the internet can be employed to bridge communities in diaspora with a shared cultural history; they’ll also discuss the challenges of accessing historical and contemporary information in a society, like Tibet, in which communication is heavily monitored.
Join us for provocative artworks, unique interactive sessions, and unexpected conversations in the Arts & Culture Experience at MozFest. Visit the MozFest website to view the full schedule. And buy your tickets now!
