Conference Hall and Studio 1
Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts
E. A. Jonušo g. 3
Nida LT-93127
‘The most important principle of interactionist methodology [in AI] is machinery parsimony: postulate the simplest machinery that is consistent with the known dynamics. . . . We should aspire to invent novel dynamic effects and experience regret when forced to invent novel devices.’
—Phillip E. Agre, Computation and Human Experience (1997)
Katherine Behar opens her studio to share experiments underway during the first month of her NAC residency.
In the NAC conference hall, Behar will screen two short videos as context for her current work.
- Artificial Ignorance (2018; 2:16) was scripted during her previous residency at Nida in 2018. It offers a humorous (but serious!) analytic, which she has developed further to ground her approach to AI.
- We Grasp at Straws (Take One) (2024, 12:56) is a component of Inside Outsourcing, a multi-year, multi-pronged project at the intersection of basketry and robotics, which Behar is continuing in Studio 1.
In Studio 1, we will look at the experimental baskets she’s creating as craft research for Inside Outsourcing. This project engages robots’ limited dexterity—evident in the technical impossibility of robotic basketry—as an opportunity for ‘close-knit’ collaborations between humans and machines.
Over drinks and snacks, we will chat about a cluster of ideas Behar has been mulling over during her many hours of basket-weaving: ‘stochastic parrots’ in large language models (LLM), predictive text, human’s noncognitive filtering, the meaninglessness of nonces, Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), nonphonetic glyphs, a history of the Chinese Computer, the 27th letter of the English alphabet, BASIC English as a ‘small’ language model, and her grandma.
Organised by Katherine Behar as part of her NAC artist residency.