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Aural Fauna

Eunsu Kang (kangeunsu@gmail.com) in collaboration with Donald Craig, Austin Dill, Songwei Ge, and Barnabas Poczos

Aural Fauna project presents an unknown form of organism, aural fauna, that reacts to the visitor’s sound and touch. According to The Sirens of Titan, harmoniums feed on humming vibrations on the planet’s surface, the song of Mercury. They perceive the world through touch. Inspired by them, the aural fauna is a family of creatures that become “alive” when there is a sound or touch fed into them. The fauna also sing in harmony to the visitor’s sound to express their acceptance of the visitor’s presence. The bodies and sounds of the fauna are generated through machine learning. The creatures’ bodies appear as 3D-printed or virtual forms in the video projection. The unique form of each entity is designed by creative AI developed by the artist team. Their sound is generated in real-time using the WaveGAN algorithm in response to the participant’s touch. This project presents a utopian vision of the world where different species, and possibly even machines, interact with each other with no fear and without the rejection or hatred that spring from it; the human visitor and aural fauna create harmony together.

 

Artist Bio

Eunsu Kang is an artist, a researcher, and an educator who explores the intersection of art and machine learning as well as the possibility of creative AI. She started her artist career with video installations and single channel videos. After more than 100 art exhibitions around the world including Korea, Japan, China, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Germany, and the US, her works have transformed into interactive and interdisciplinary art projects, which currently focuses on the nascent area of AI art. All ten of her past solo shows, consisting of individual or collaborative projects, were invited or awarded. She has won the Korean National Grant for Arts three times. Her works have been presented at conferences including ACM, ICMC, ISEA, SIGGRAPH Asia, and NeurIPS. Kang earned her Ph.D. from DXARTS at the University of Washington, an MA from MAT at UCSB, and an MFA from Ewha Womans University. A few years ago she left her tenured art professor position to design and teach new courses (Art and Machine Learning, Creative AI) at the Machine Learning Department of Carnegie Mellon University. Recently she co-founded the Women+ Art AI collective (womenart.ai). http://kangeunsu.com