Looking Outwards-08

Sarah Groff Hennigh Palermo(Sarah.GHP),is an artist, a programmer, and a data designer. A link to her personal website is http://sarahghp.com.

Sarah graduated from Integrated Digital Media program in NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. She is interested in constructing technology and information in different ways. She wants to create art works that move away from an information-instrumental view of data and into more artistic, humane, and sensitive approach.

In her presentation, she begins with telling the audience her disappointment in how info and data have become big concerns in life as authoritarian forces and big companies constantly extract information from citizens using high technology. She condemns this the lack of privacy and believes that information, data, computers, and high technology should not threaten people’s identity safety and negatively influence our life in general. Thus, she proposed the idea of undermining computing. She explains that this is not to oppose computers as “destroy computer and we will live in the woods”. Instead, she suggests that we should simply take a step back and explore different ways of handling technology. I think her idea is very interesting so I’m looking forward to see how Sarah manages to incorporate this concept in her works. Sarah brings up an alarming problem that we all face in the 21st century. It is constantly debated and argued that what should be the ideal relationship between humans and computers. Sarah moves on by introducing her projects. She has been performing live visuals with her algorithmic band, Codie. They have given performances which involves live coding, dance, and music at multiple locations. I think it’s amazing that by combining dance, music, and visuals, and have them modified alive, Sarah and her band create art pieces that use technology partially but not entirely rely on it. Instead, human is a crucial aspect of all these works and technology is more like a tool. It allows human creativity, participation, intervention, and individuality. Sarah presents some of their performance videos. They have been including pop geometry, adding different features, and accumulating random movements of bits and pieces with people dancing to the party music in the background.They are also accepting human failures and making failures interesting as sometimes the program gives them surprising results when there are errors.
Sarah explains that AI art is usually futuristic, magic, and novel. People spend too much effort expressing how fascinating a futuristic, high-tech world is yet ignore the fact that human behaviors can be equally valuable and interesting.