Focus Quebec afternoon will round up with a panel on artificial intelligence / artificial life. Often cited as a nerve center of production for contemporary digital art as well as for research and development in artificial intelligence, Quebec has become a hub for explorations of possible intersections between AI and art. In this panel we gather Quebec and international experts: artists, curators and critics, to interrogate recent developments of AI from a perspective of artificial life.

To what extent can we think of AI as not just a new kind of intelligence but as a new kind of species, and what can the cultivation and manipulation of the living teach us about contemporary AI tools and their possible futures. Considering that intelligence, like all forms of life, is necessarily situated in a material substrate, can artistic and critical practices in the field of artificial and synthetic life point us to imagine an artificial intelligence more situated and embodied, one that perhaps operates less in the polarities of control and dominance.

This panel is organized in collaboration with Hexagram.