Critical Platform is a regular programme of presentations and debates, exploring the work of artists within the context of current artistic practice and theory. Each event brings together artists and curators to discuss issues in live and digital arts, and provides a forum in which the audience can question and challenge the artists themselves. These debates are supported by Hull School of media Technologies and Hull School of Art and Design.

Presentation and Debate:
Can Computers Make Art?
Brian J Ford & Geraint Wiggins

Wednesday 15 th December
Gulbenkian Centre, University of Hull*
6 – 8pm FREE

*A University of Hull campus map in PDF format can be downloaded here.

We feel very differently about an object created by a machine compared to an object created by the hand of a skilled, human craftsman, but is this distinction fair? If artificial intelligence is possible, why not artificial creativity?

In December’s Critical Platform, broadcaster, writer and scientist Brian J Ford, and Professor of Computational Creativity Geraint Wiggins will look at the possibility or impossibility of computers behaving in creative ways, and in doing so address the very nature of the creative action itself.

Perhaps by addressing the issue of Artificial Intelligence artists can question our understanding of our own intelligence, awareness and creativity. Perhaps the artist should have a central role in creating richer, more human forms of Artificial Intelligence.

 

Image by Jaques Sirot

Presentation and Debate:
Performing in Cyberspace
Sally Jane Norman & Ghislaine Boddington

Wednesday 19 th January
Gulbenkian Centre, University of Hull
6 – 8pm FREE

The physical body carries with it a huge range of ideas: ideas of identity, uniqueness and mortality.
How are these associations disrupted when the body is extended beyond the physical and into virtual spaces?


 What happens when the performer is freed from the constraints of flesh and blood?

Performers are increasingly exploring the space that exists between the real and the virtual. Forms, ideas and experiences bleed from the real into the virtual, and from the virtual into the real.

Artist and theorist Sally Jane Norman of Newcastle’s Culture Lab and Ghislaine Boddington of Future Physical will show how artists have developed the possibilities of digitally mediated performance and consider the implications of their actions.

 
Image by Jaques Sirot