Tag: Kasia Molga

Inspace Gallery: How to Find the Soul of a Sailor

The New Real Unveils First Iteration of Kasia Molga’s Immersive Multimedia Experience, How to Find the Soul of a Sailor, at Inspace Gallery

Exhibition Dates: December 12 – 21, 2024; January 6 – 11, 2025, closed on Sundays.

Times: 10:00-17:00

Exhibition launch: December 12, 2024 5pm – 8pm, artist talk and light refreshments.

Tickets are limited

Please reserve a ticket on Eventbrite – How to Find the Soul of a Sailor Artist Talk and Opening Event Tickets, Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 5:00 PM | Eventbrite

Free admission

Location: Inspace Gallery, 1 Crichton St, Newington, Edinburgh EH8 9AB

Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible venue

Kasia Molga, an acclaimed interdisciplinary artist, designer and storyteller invites you to explore her first iteration of How to Find the Soul of a Sailor, a deeply personal and innovative project that fuses the past, present, and future through the lens of artificial intelligence and memory.

This work is the result of The New Real 2023-2024 commission “Uncanny Machines” supported by the Scottish AI Alliance. Hosted at Inspace Gallery with additional support from Arts Council England, this unique early access version runs from December 12-21, 2024, and January 6-11, 2025.

Immerse yourself in a deeply personal journey to the future of our oceans and sailors’ time at sea. Experience the Mediterranean sea through the eyes of Molga’s late father, Tadeusz Molga, a devoted sailor.

During his voyages, he meticulously documented his passion for the ocean, a love he shared with young Kasia as she accompanied him on his ship. Fifteen years after his passing, Molga is left with a profound sense of loss and a collection of his cherished diaries. When the memories of their time together begin to fade, she turns to these diaries, clinging to the remnants of his voice and their shared experiences at sea.

Molga’s work captures an emotional and environmental journey highlighting the fragility of our oceans, the ever-changing work conditions of sailors, and speculates on the future and what her father would say.

Molga uses The New Real’s specialised experiential AI platform, The New Real Observatory, to reimagine her father’s words, projecting them 50 years into the future. This project is a powerful fusion of memory and technology, blending generative AI tools with climate data to create an emotionally charged narrative that visualises both the past and future of our oceans.

Molga’s exhibition uniquely combines English and Polish, creating a bilingual experience that delves into the profound topics of personal connection to climate change and the digital afterlife. Her work not only honours the enduring power of memory but also showcases the potential benefits and drawbacks of various artificial intelligence tools to preserve and transform our personal histories.

This exhibition is a must-see for those interested in the intersections of art, technology, and the environment, offering a poignant reflection on the future of our planet and the boundless possibilities of human-AI collaboration.

UNCANNY MACHINES: International artist Kasia Molga awarded The New Real’s major AI Art Commission

The New Real, a world-leading and Edinburgh-based AI research hub. has premiered its leading international AI Art award and commission that brings together the foremost institutions in both the AI and the arts, and announced UK and Netherlands-based Polish artist Kasia Molga as the winner of The New Real 2023 AI Art Commission: Uncanny Machines.

This award and commission gives artists an unrivalled opportunity to extend their practice by providing them a powerful and accessible generative AI tool, The New Real’s own AI Platform.

This is a fascinating and unique ‘tool box’ created with and for artists, to gain increased access and control over an AI model and to creatively explore AI.

This addresses limitations in the current crop of generative AI applications, in order to open new thinking which can lead to better art, and also provides a basis to probe and question urgent issues of today. Introduced as part of The New Real’s AI Art Programme: Uncanny Machines which explores the uncanny interplay of humans and machines, and the social implications of recent developments in AI.

The winner was publicly revealed on Friday at the event entitled The New Real Salon: The Algorithmic Turn at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

The event culminates the EFI’s Love Machine season of events bringing into light the intimate relationships between humans and algorithms. 

At this event the artist was joined by guest speakers; activist and self proclaimed cultural engineer Phoenix Perry, who shared insights into generative AI creative work, and leading academic in the fields of AI, Data Arts and Society, and Drew Hemment, who hosted a debate with Kasia Molga on the societal and ethical issues of digital reincarnations of deceased persons, a topic the art commission will explore.

The Open Call received a huge volume of outstanding submissions which the Jury whittled down to just five astonishing candidates who each received Development Awards. Kasia Molga is now revealed as the artist awarded the full commission allowing her to bring her concept to life.

The commission is designed to provide transformative experiences for audiences, fuelled by AI, and present an artwork that addresses key challenges in AI, such as consent, agency and confusion of humans and machines

In her project entitled How to find the Soul of a Sailor, Kasia Molga presents a very personal journey to find the soul of her father in data from a life spent on the seas. As a child, Molga travelled with her sailor father on merchant navy vessels. Her father often was the lone parent caring for her on board the ship.

They were two people who understood each other without words – sometimes Molga felt she could read her dad’s thoughts. He passed away quite unexpectedly 15 years ago leaving a huge hole in Molga’s heart and many diaries from his journeys.

Sometimes when Molga fears that her memories of being on the open sea with him are fading, she rereads his diaries trying to hang on to his voice.

In her commission, Molga will draw on her experiments using The New Real’s AI platform to recreate stories in his voice.

Having constructed a dataset from ships’ logs, her dad’s own diaries, and a British Library collection of maps from the Mediterranean Sea, Molga uses a Word2vec feature to explore, among others, whether AI can convincingly recreate a way of writing such that aspects of her dad’s personality can be ‘sensed’ and what are the implications and emotional effects of such a way of ‘resurrecting’ a person who is no longer with us. More on Kasia Molga’s project can be found here.

Announced earlier this year, The New Real 2023 Development Awards allowed five artists; Kasia Molga, Johann Diedrick & Amina Abbas-Nazari, Alice Bucknell, Sarah Ciston and Linnea Langfjord Kristensen & Kevin Walker, to conduct research and development (R&D) using The New Real’s AI Platform: a fascinating and unique ‘tool box’ created with and for artists, allowing them to manipulate a model, in order to enable profound artistic experiments with AI.

The output of the R&D phase is a visual presentation and talk. These five talks were screened at Inspace alongside this event.

The Uncanny Machines Art Commission will be presented later this year. Details to follow.

Drew Hemment, Director and Principal Investigator of The New Real, said: “We have achieved something truly unique in bringing together new ideas in both science and the arts to tackle urgent challenges just at the moment that Generative AI has exploded into the world’s consciousness.

“It is with huge pleasure we announce today that Kasia Molga has been awarded our coveted New Real 2023 Art Commission. Kasia blew us away with her vision and the intensely personal journey she wants to take with The New Real. She hopes to use AI to give new life to her father’s memories, and to bring a fresh perspective on the world’s oceans that he travelled his entire life.

“This is the next step in our journey to develop more fair and inclusive technologies, and to support artists to develop significant works.”

Winning artist, Artist Kasia Molga, said: “It is a huge pleasure and delight to work with The New Real, they are the leading group spanning the arts and AI in this way.

“This project is of the greatest personal importance to me. My dad’s diaries are extremely precious, and this is my way of showing my love for my father, and my shared concern for the ocean, his life’s passion.

“I’m excited to go to places I could not have imagined before using AI, and I can think of no one better to share this journey than The New Real.

“On one hand, this new body of work is about the transition of marine ecosystems. Yet it also probes the emotional implications of giving away data – almost fragments of personality – of departed loved ones and the ethics of AI in the context of digital afterlives.

“The work will use AI wisely to reveal unexpected interconnections between the words of those no longer with us and such large subjects as oceans and climate change.”