Mikhail Maksimov is a graduate from, and teacher at, the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia in Moscow, director, animator, and creator of video-installations. Maximov’s cinema exists in a different, parallel reality. It escapes the video art category, and is not embedded in the usual cinematic conventions. The retrospective of Maximov’s work will cover short videos, computer games and game-art videos.

Short Films
01 – Razor Arm
02 – Skladen:Front Ohne Gnade
03 – Chevengur
04 – Mother Give Birth 2 Husband Father
05 – Unheimat
06 – MMTP:Obmyak
07 – Mother Calls
“cycles_nosound” a few silent small videos
“gamestreams” – I`m playing with my games

Game-art video
Replace Me
MotherGame

Can you imagine what will be collected by museums one hundred years from now? Think about how many new things have been found, learned and invented in the last hundred years. We have gone from the first modern traffic lights being installed in 1918 to self-driving cars in 2018. The job of navigating roads safely is something we now trust to technology and artificial intelligence.
When designing the intelligent selections machine, we wanted to see if artificial intelligence could also work to predict the future of a museum’s collection by looking at objects in the archives that relate to the history of invention, industry and innovation in the North of England, a place with roots in the industrial revolution. It uses its knowledge of this collection as a starting point to guess what the future will hold. It is a light-hearted look at how intelligent artificial intelligence really is.
This piece was commissioned by Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums for the Great Exhibition of the North in 2018 and was first shown at the Great North Gallery.

Dominic Smith
An artist and curator whose practice involves a hands-on, open and interrogative approach to working in the overlapping fields of art & technology. This has presented itself as ad-hoc artists groups, surreptitious apocalypse proof P2P systems, socially engaged – drone based narratives and recent research into Blockchain technologies and Machine Learning. For more information go to http://dominicsmith.info

Pete Haughie
Pete Haughie is a technological free radical. Free to experiment in art, hardware and code as he sees fit to solve problems that may or may not exist in the realms of the real or digital.

UK 2018

It consists of re-purposed footage from Walt Disney’s Nature’s Half Acre (1951), with its parables about domesticated postwar suburbia: nest building, chick rearing, mother love, industrious insects, and traditional gender roles. In this case, the new voiceover – replacing Winston Hibler – also focuses on romantic anthropomorphism. The difference is this voiceover has been generated by a neural network which has learned its existence entirely from reading the female protagonist voice in romance novels. Using image recognition/ closed captioning, it tells an entirely different story of the birds and the bees of nature documentary: one of female desire, trauma, masochism, and emotional fantasy. Commissioned by Live Cinema UK.

Anna Ridler
(b. 1985, UK) is an artist and researcher. She has exhibited at institutions such as the V&A Museum, Ars Electronica, HeK Basel, Impakt and the Barbican Centre and has degrees from the Royal College of Art, Oxford University and University of Arts London. She was a 2018 EMAP fellow and was listed by Artnet as one of nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential. She is interested in working with collections of information, particularly self-generated data sets, to create new and unusual narratives in a variety of mediums, and what happens when things cannot fit into discrete categories. She is currently interested in the intersection of machine learning and nature and what we can learn from history.

The story of technologist Ross Goodwin and his literary artificial intelligent robot as they set out to write the longest novel in the English language. The AI is installed into a car, with a surveillance camera (eyes), microphone (ears), GPS (sense of place), and laptop (brain) running an AI algorithm that has been trained on Ross’s favorite novels and poets. Following in the tradition of American literary road trip books (On The Road, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), this is a story of discovery that calls into question the humanity of creativity. As automation and artificial intelligence brings fear and wonder to everyday life, this story opens the discussion to consider the impact of technology beyond the economy and into the realm of art and creativity.

Lewis Rapkin
has spent the past decade working as an editor, producer and/or composer on documentaries for HBO, VICE, PBS, Tribeca Studios, Discovery, NBC and VOX among others. He directed the feature documentary LIVE FROM TOKYO about the underground music scene in Tokyo and his film VIVIR debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Nespresso Talents US Grand Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival.
In collaboration with Dolby Laboratories, he directed and composed the score for the short documentary Automatic On The Road, which was one of the first soundtracks to ever be conceived of and mixed in Dolby Atmos surround. He was an associate editor on the Emmy award winning documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, as well as a lead editor on the founding team to launch VICE News in 2013. For the last ten years he has been working as an editor, producer and/or composer on documentaries for HBO, VICE, PBS, Tribeca Studios, Discovery, NBC and VOX among

short animation, a moving painting, a music video and an experiment in creating narrative using neural networks. EONS was created entirely using artificial neural nets: The Generative Adversarial Net BigGAN (Andrew Brock et al.) was used to create the visuals, while the Music was composed by Music Transformer (Anna Huang et al.).The work aims to remind us of our short and myopic existence on this plant, our relationship with nature at geological timescales, which, despite all our accumulated scientific knowledge, remain emotionally incomprehensible to us.In the nascent field of AI-art, Eons is pioneering a strong narrative basis and arch, which goes beyond abstract imagery and uses novel techniques to direct the flow of neural network generated imagery together with synchronization to the generated music.

Mike Tyka
studied Biochemistry and Biotechnology at the University of Bristol. He obtained his PhD in Biophysics in 2007 and went on to work as a research fellow at the University of Washington to study the structure and dynamics of protein molecules. In particular, he has been interested in protein folding and has been writing computer simulation software to better understand this fascinating process. Mike joined Google in 2012 and worked on creating a neuron-level map of fly and mouse brain tissue using computer vision and machine learning. Mike also works with artificial neural networks as an artistic medium and tool. In 2015 created some of the first large-scale artworks using Iterative DeepDream and co-founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google. In 2017 he collaborated with Refik Anadol to create a pioneering immersive projection installation using Generative Adversarial Networks called “Archive Dreaming”. His latest generative series “Portraits of Imaginary People” has been shown at ARS Electronica in Linz, Christie’s in New York and at the New Museum in Karuizawa (Japan). His kinetic, AI-driven sculpture “Us and Them” was featured at the 2018 Mediacity Biennale at the Seoul Museum of Art.