Digital speech- and text-recognition assistants are part of our everyday life today. Social media is being inhabited by armies of socialbots and various non-human users. Algorithmic text recognition and fabrication play an increasingly important role in our written and spoken culture.
Numerous media art works reflect on the history of Artificial Intelligence, some more specifically to the first important milestones of text recognition - practically to the ancestors of what we call today Natural Language Processing. Besides showing some examples of interactive artworks closely related to AI and NLP, Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák will give an insight to the history of algorithmic text recognition and fabrication.
Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák was born in 1969 in Budapest, Hungary where he lives and works today. He graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, first from the Painting (1992), later from the Intermedia Department (1994). Currently he works as the director of the Doctoral School of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and as a professor of the Intermedia Department.
His artistic approach can be characterized by experimentalism closely related to technical media. Szegedy-Maszák uses a broad spectrum of mediums in his artworks, from traditional chemical based photographical processes through painting and printmaking to interactive virtual- and augmented reality installations. Albeit his artistic approach is strongly based on media (an)archeology and the creative applications of contemporary digital technology, his art became internationally known by his immersive installations from the 1990-s, where the meaningful usage of special interfaces and digital technology made explorable the computer generated illusions. His artworks combine cutting edge tools with anachronistic processes both in terms of technology and meaning; intentionally confronting the viewer with the (historical) determination of our world picture by our depicting technologies.