Judy is currently self-employed, running a blog, being a promoter for products and making some income from doing freelance article writing for others. A graphic artist by training, she finds traditional work environment too constraining to her creativity.

As such she prides herself on being a scrapper and digital native who learns to do everything and get by with her own efforts. Judy has picked up skills in basic coding and administration of content management system (CMS) on her own when running her own blog so as to cut down on the cost. She is familiar with HTML, CSS and Javascript because she has to design and develop her own webpages.

She is active with the design communities in Discord, and recently discovered the coding communities flourishing in Github, Kaggle, Code.org, Discord and DAGsHub. Judy realised that there is a goldmine of openly available code tutorials and code blocks for her to experiment, self-learn and build her own digital tools. With her limited budget, she is open to invest her own time to learn and build new tools for herself, as she lack the funds to spend on expensive software to help with her freelance work.

Through Judy's learning journey, you will understand some considerations required for exploring tougher code projects such as:

• Conduct information research
• Understand the value of team work and collaboration
• Define the tools of the trade
• Reverse-engineer new learning points from available resources

Are you ready to begin exploring with Judy?

Here is the list of resources and generic reference points compiled for Judy's Journey:

• [Resource] Information gathering exercise for "What can AI do at this current moment in time?": Click here for link to google document
• [Resource] Lego Art Remix: https://lego-art-remix.com/
• [Resource] Lego Art Remix Source Code, Github: https://github.com/debkbanerji/lego-art-remix
• [Resource] Create your own mosaic masterpiece with Lego Art Remix [Review & Interview]: https://www.brothers-brick.com/2020/08/27/create-your-own-mosaic-masterpiece-with-lego-art-remix-review-interview/
• [Generic Reference] W3, Web Design Standards: https://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/
• [Generic Reference] The History of Artificial Intelligence, by Rockwell Anyoha. Harvard University, The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Ref: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/history-artificial-intelligence/
• [Generic Reference] The Stanford Natural Language Processing Group. Linguistics, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. Ref: https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/
• [Generic Reference] Linguistics, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. Ref: https://linguistics.stanford.edu/research/computational-linguistics
• [Generic Reference] An Inconvenient Truth About AI AI won't surpass human intelligence anytime soon. Rodney Brooks. IEEE Spectrum. Ref: https://spectrum.ieee.org/rodney-brooks-ai#toggle-gdpr
• [Generic Reference] Melanie Mitchell - The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QBvSVYotVc
• [Book Reference] Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (2002). Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach. Prentice Hall Series in Artificial Intelligence.

Judy's Perspective: So you want to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Art

Recently AI has been buzzing in Judy's Discord channels. Some designers were bemoaning the rise of AI and their jobs being stolen. Others were sharing code scripts and new ideas for integrating new technologies with their work and creation.

Clicking on one link lead to another and she realised that certain things are now possible with all the new technologies. She saw a new opportunity and field of learning for herself.

Her "tribe" of designer friends each have their own ideas of what to explore with AI technologies, especially when paired with other up and coming applications of immersive media technologies which is also on parallel path of ascend and bears the potential of twin disruptions.

As individuals, they have their own agendas in learning and understanding AI and other emerging technologies, but none of them are particularly strong programmers or are they from engineering backgrounds. They are used to helping each other close the gap when it comes to learning new things and sharing info to keep everyone aware of novel initiatives, competitions and job opportunities in the horizons.

To find synergy to work together, the initial group discussion exploded into a brainstorm and idea generation session as they try to find a common ground to start from, so that they can align, explore together and accelerate in their learning.

They start by identifying the questions to ask, to find answers for.

• What is AI and its origns?
• What can commercial AI do at this current moment in time?
• Who has currently done art and design projects in the AI space?
• Where can they find learning resources and code projects to self-learn AI topics, experiment, test and showcase?
• What should they first zoom in and focus for hands-on?

Judy's Perspective: AI and its origns

An hour of info search and the group began to compile their understanding into an infographic.

"So it seems that AI is actually considered a young field that was formally initiated in 1956." Eddie who was usually the one helping to guide the team noted. "The study of AI is deeply entwinned with the study of human intelligence which is started by philosophers 2000 years ago. The goal of AI is the creation of the General Artificial Intelligence (GAI)."

"It is actually linked to my area of expertise" Sally said excitedly as she began to connect the dots. Sally came from a psychology background and teaches art therapy to cultivate mental wellness. "The understanding of human intelligence is one of the oldest disciplines. So it appears that for AI, psychology plays a part in helping to figure out how humans see, learn, remember, reason, problem solve and interact with the world and the entities within."

"Basically humans being humans, have egos, and wish to express and create what they perceived as intelligence and sculpt it in an artificial form." Judy concluded.

"I wouldn't exactly frame it that way" Eddie said with a laugh. "The way commercial AI technologies are being designed and developed in the market right now are less for artistic expression of intelligence, or social good, but more influenced by economist thinking, e.g., collecting user-generated data to conduct consumer behavioral analysis and automated recommendation, optimization and automation of manual workflows for cost savings or efficiency in production."

"Maybe it will help if we can map out the information." Mary the last member of the group said as she opened up Adobe XD on the Team's shared screen. "Let's start noting down the key points and maybe draft it out as an image to help everyone understand."

Group Notes:
AI is the expression and creation of intelligence in an artificial form. Started in 1956, AI has went through two period of hypes and AI winters. In the current timeline, this is the 3rd cycle of the AI hype.

For artificial intelligence to succeed, two things are required.

• The ability to CREATE the artificial intelligence.
• The ability to HOST and SUSTAIN the artificial intelligence.

At this moment in time, the computer is identified as the best bet for hosting and creating AIs.

• Computer Science which is the study of computers and computational systems, is one of the core building blocks of AI.
• Computer Engineering provides the electronic systems, sensors and breakthrough devices that allows for the continued exploration of AI.

Without the body and the software engineering layer, there can be no deployment of cognitive software.

To prevent and mitigate the possibility of a 3rd AI winter, there is now a larger and more informed pool of academics and industry researchers publicly reflecting on past failed promises in the domain, rebalancing market hype to set more realistic expectations, and redefining what problems are best-fit or solvable with current state AI technologies, based on the convergence of a society's maturity in humanities, science, engineering and technology, within this period of time.

Judy's Perspective: Common commercial use-cases of AI in this moment of time

AI technologies have seen commercial applications in:

• Information search
• Marketing
• Sales
• Business intelligence
• Customer service
• Human resource management
• Data discovery and/or harmonisation tasks
• Robotic process automation (RPA)
• Machine orchestration

"Basically they can be applied all across the board in different industries, where work to be done have certain level of structure and possesses repetitive steps, where there exists clean historical data and effective electronic sensors to capture or replicate the default inputs, so as to automate or better support certain areas of a human's work." Judy noted as the group shared their findings.

"The more important question when applying or integrating AI technologies seems to then start from understanding of the problem to be solved before solutions can be designed for." Eddie shared. "If there is a viable Art problem to be solved with AI, it is wholly possible."

Reflection exercise

What AI technology might you have utilised today?

AI technologies are actually quite prevalent in modern society's everyday life. We overlook them most of the time because they are invisible, just like how our sensory inputs are "invisibly" processed by our brains which generates our behaviors and reactions.

Take a few moments to pause. As you reflect, think and write down in your journal; if you have encountered:

• a device containing "smart" functionality,
• a sensor or a program that might have or is linked to a cloud/edge AI, or
• have utilised a clearly labelled AI technology e.g., Alexa, Siri.

Who has currently done art and design projects in the AI space?

Some on-going real world samples of projects, debate, entities and players in the move towards AI-augmented creativity.

The Spirit Machine
An AI-based art installation writing texts inspired by the work of Maria Montessori. For Radboud University, The Netherlands.

• Artist: Jeroen van der Most
• Co-creator: Gabriëlle Ras, PhD candidate AI

Ref: https://www.jeroenvandermost.com/the-spirit-machine

AI for Oceans
Education web application with machine learning plug-in, designed with interactive graphical elements, to teach foundation theories behind machine learning.

• Entity: Code.org

Ref: https://studio.code.org/s/oceans/lessons/1/levels/2

JukeBox
A neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles.

• Entity: OpenAI

Ref: https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/

AIArtists.org
A community of artists exploring Artificial Intelligence. The community curate historically significant Artificial Intelligence art, AI art tools to use in creative practice, and serve as a global clearinghouse for AI’s impact on art and culture.

• Entity: AIArtists.org

Ref: https://aiartists.org/

AI for Art Society
Promotes augmented creativity through AI and the arts. It is of the perspective that new technologies, and in particular artificial intelligence, are changing the nature of creative processes. Emerging collaborations between humans and machines enable new creative processes.

• Entity: ARTIFICIA

Ref: https://www.artificia.pro/
Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnBnCj_LSV8

Art Analytics
The blog of Jason Bailey, an art nerd trying to trigger an art analytics revolution. Jason is mission driven to use technology and data to improve the world's art historical record and to bring attention to artists working at the intersection of art and technology.

• Entity: Artnome

Ref: https://www.artnome.com/

Compilation of learning resources, tools and code projects for self-study/experimentation

To begin exploring, some knowledge blocks for acquisition, so as to better assist in self-study, experimentation and practice are:

• Coding
• Traditional generative art and multimedia theory
• Machine learning and deep learning
• Multimedia filters, existing or emerging toolkits
• Some math, computer science and AI theory

Resource Links:

• Dive into Deep Learning: https://d2l.ai/
  • Generative Adversarial Networks: https://d2l.ai/chapter_generative-adversarial-networks/index.html
• Pytorch ecosystem: https://pytorch.org/ecosystem/
• Tensorflow hub: https://tfhub.dev/
  • Tensorflow curriculum: https://www.tensorflow.org/resources/learn-ml#curriculums
• AIArtists.org's compilation of AI generated art tools: https://aiartists.org/ai-generated-art-tools
• Towards Data Science's Generative Art Articles Compilation: https://towardsdatascience.com/tagged/generative-art
• Generative artistry's tutorials and podcast: https://generativeartistry.com/
• Papers with Code (music generation): https://paperswithcode.com/task/music-generation
• Learning computer science at home: https://code.org/athome
• Between Science and Art: https://between-science-and-art.com/

Self-Assessment

What is your interest? If you were to explore an AI augmented creative project, which will you work on?

Write some ideas down in your journal.

Judy's Perspective: First AI art collaboration - a simple image processing project

Click Here to Open Up the Video in a Separate Browser Tab

"Seems like there are actually a lot of exploration in this space already." Judy noted in surprise after the group's preliminary information search and resource compilation. "I guess we don't know what we don't know."

"The machine learning and deep learning tutorials does seems quite heavy on the math and theory." Eddie noted. "But we can always focus on the fundamentals and the areas that we are exploring instead of deep diving into everything."

"The good thing about the variety of public exploration by others, is that there are quite a number of open code projects. It does seems that most of them are written in Python." Mary said as she goes through the compilation. "We just need to find someone, a 'guiding star in the night sky' to follow as we scramble to reverse-engineer their learning points. These people in the lead will already have broken a path for exploration."

"I only know some rudimentary Python for structured data processing, and most of you are familiar with HTML and Javascript, how about we choose one of the simpler projects done primarily in HTML and Javascript to review and understand how the code works?" Eddie said as he tried to guide the group to converge into a common exploration area.

"There's this creator Deb Banerji who coded a LEGO Art Remix tool, which convert images into mosaic patterned output. It apparently utilises a deep neural network to compute depth maps within the browser." Sally noted as she shared a few links with the group. "It could be a good start for us to go through the Javascripts to understand where to amend or to extend to create our own take on this."

"It appears that the code helps to separate the depth of colors in an image." Judy said as she browse through the article which mentioned the code project. "Let's give this a try, I already have some ideas about how to incorporate the code as part of my graphic design toolkit."

*Remarks: Open-source code projects comes with a variety of licenses. Do read and understand the right-of-use for each open-source projects. Open-source does not always means free. Some of the open-source licenses do have strings attached. Similarly to literature, depending on the context, codes can be protected under copyright. It is always good practice to cite the source of your code references.

Did you know about Singapore Art Week (SAW)?

From the SAW Website:
"The Open Call for Singapore Art Week 2022 is now closed!...
For its 10th anniversary, SAW 2022 is inviting artists, curators, producers and partners to develop physical, digital and hybrid projects that explores re-generation and transformation in the new world that we live in. As we ponder this sea-change and our relationship with the world, SAW 2022 invites all to explore the possibilities that this moment in time offers: ways forward and ways to connect, beyond time, borders, cultures and histories. How do we harness art’s potential to interrogate the present, uplift spirits, and envisage a sturdy future for ourselves? Shall we and can we, be the difference for a transformed tomorrow?"

Description of SAW:
The Singapore Art Week (SAW) is an annual visual arts platform jointly organised by the National Arts Council, Singapore Tourism Board and the Singapore Economic Development Board to profile homegrown artists and art projects.

Held each year in January, SAW takes place in and around the island across various venues where we live and work: arts and cultural institutions, private galleries, art precincts, independent art spaces, public spaces and homes. SAW is a platform that brings fresh and innovative programmes to both local and international audiences.