Can a building have a heart? Melbourne Connect’s AI artwork
Title: Can a building have a heart? Melbourne Connect’s AI artwork
When: Thu, 20 Apr 2023 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM AEST
Speaker: Dr Robert Walton, Mr Zaher Joukhadar
Format: 30 minute presentation & 30 minute open discussion via Zoom
Abstract: The Heart is a site-responsive, slow Artificial Intelligence artwork to be lived with over decades. It reveals the pulse of a superorganism: the community visiting, living, and working in Melbourne Connect, a city-block size building, home of businesses, university departments, a kindergarten, accommodation, and a science museum. The Heart beats indefinitely for and with the life of the building and its community.
The Heart is connected to 4800 ‘Building Information Modelling’ (BIM) sensors. These monitor CO2, humidity, room occupancy, temperature, movement, light, and more. The building adjusts the environment to create the optimum conditions for human comfort and safety. Normally, the automated work of building sensors and systems is dispersed and imperceptible. The Heart stages the building’s ‘sensations’ in a way people can perceive and begin to empathise with. It does this by taking form in the foyer of Melbourne Connect as a 10-metre-tall volume of brass droppers, reconstituted brick fragments, and LEDs in the shape of a giant human heart.
About the speaker:
Dr Robert Walton
Dr Robert Walton is a multi-award-winning artist and director whose works span theatre, choreography, installation, writing and interactive art. He is the Dean’s Research Fellow in The Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at The University of Melbourne where he leads the creation of performances and artworks that explore the expressive potential of ancient and emerging technologies including, artificial intelligence, theatre, virtual holograms, swarm robotics, standing stones, engineered bacterial bioluminescence, ritual, MR/XR, storytelling, building information model data, and ambient computing.
Mr Zaher Joukhadar
Zaher is a research data specialist, currently working at the Chancellery of The University of Melbourne. He is a part of the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP), an interdisciplinary team working to uplift digital research capabilities at the university.
Throughout the past decade, Zaher has gained extensive experience in research and industry, specializing in visual computing, mixed reality, image processing, and machine learning. He graduated as the top-ranking computer science student from The University of Aleppo in 2010 and went on to earn a master’s degree from The University of Melbourne. Zaher’s exceptional academic achievements have been recognized with four awards for outstanding scholarship and three postgraduate travel awards.
HADES Seminar Series: Humanities in the Digital Age
From the Humanities and Diverse eResearch Scholars group (HADES), this series brings together a wide range of interdisciplinary research at the intersection of Humanities and digital scholarship. We will hear from speakers on topics ranging from digital ethics and machine learning through to architecture and literary studies, but always with a focus on the crucial role that the Humanities play in helping to explain and shape complex human experiences. The series aims to challenge and extend understandings of digital research in the Humanities and present new and emerging work by scholars working across and between disciplines.
Seminars will usually be held monthly on the third Thursday of every month at 3:30pm.
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