Unlocking the Black Box of AI Listening Machines: Assemblages for Art, Technology and Innovation

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Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan
School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication University of Texas at Dallas
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7984-9442

The black box of innovation in the realm of connected AI technologies renders not only their technicalities opaque but also, and more importantly, the social effects and relations that constitute their creation and mediation. This presents an opportunity for creative interventions by artists and researchers, to unveil the networked relations that are part of AI technologies, and speculate on their ontological effects. This article presents such an unpacking around an AI listening machine present today in ubiquitous devices like voice assistants and smart speakers, and incorporates computational models of machine audition. By tracing the scientific research, technical expertise, and social relations that led to our cultural adoption of AI listening machines, the article presents a socio-technical assemblage within which these machines operate. At the same time, the article reveals various contexts for artists as well as innovation researchers to engage with the socio-technical complexity of AI listening machines, by sharing some instances of creative and artistic interventions that have attempted to unveil the nature of their assemblages.

Keywords
intelligent agents, computational art and design, machine listening, socio-technical systems, auditory scene analysis

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How to Cite
Ramakrishnan, Sharath Chandra. “Unlocking the Black Box of AI Listening Machines: Assemblages for Art, Technology and Innovation”. Artnodes, no. 26, pp. 1-9, doi:10.7238/a.v0i26.3362.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

(c) Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan, 2020


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Author Biography

Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan, School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication University of Texas at Dallas

Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan is a creative technologist, hybrid practitioner and educator across the cognitive sciences, human machine interaction and technology policy. He is the Director of the Signal Cultures Lab that investigates creative possibilities and techno-cultural implications of pervasive AI technologies of human and machine listening. Previously as a cognitive neuroscience researcher, he studied networks of multimodal and audio cognition in sound and language processing at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India. He is a licensed amateur radio broadcaster (callsign: VU3HPA), extending his creative practice with sound and signals in the wireless spectrum as a transmission & signal artist. His current research in the field of  Art & Technology seeks to make novel contributions to the fields of Sound Studies, Auditory Cognition and Machine Listening, prior to which he specialised in AI and interactive virtual environments at the University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics. Twitter: @AgentSpock

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7984-9442

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