Dr. Ellen Pearlman - KI und Erinnerung

In the organizer's words:

When language disappears - Dr. Ellen Pearlman on artificial intelligence and memory.

The MiR.LAB is launching its first residency: the international artist and researcher Dr. Ellen Pearlman is visiting Gelsenkirchen from New York. For two weeks, she will be working with the MiR.LAB team on the development of new artistic approaches for combining artificial intelligence and music theater. At the end, she will give insights into her pioneering work in a lecture on AI and memory.

How will we remember? Dr. Ellen Pearlman presents the project "Language Is Leaving Me - An AI Cinematic Opera Of The Skin". In this work, artificial intelligence is combined with biometric data, such as skin and muscle measurements. The project has already won the "Lumen Prize Moving Image Award in AI" and is one of the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab's "Top 50 Immersive Experiences of 2023". "Language Is Leaving Me" (LILM) explores how artificial intelligence influences human perception, our memory and our individual identities - in sometimes disturbing ways. The central theme of the work is inherited memory. Particularly with regard to cultures that experience or have experienced a diaspora, memories are seen as an intergenerational legacy. Traumatic collective memories can affect DNA and be passed down through generations.
Dr. Pearlman shows how AI attempts to understand and represent such complex memories - and how the original meaning is often distorted in the process. To do this, she uses data sets and large language models (such as Laion 5-B via Stable Diffusion software), which form the basis of AI models. With the help of these technologies, artificial intelligence can read and analyze content such as images and texts. In "Language Is Leaving Me", these techniques are used to create a video and an AI-based representation of memories. This allows a direct comparison between video and AI to illustrate the artificially generated memory loss. Dr. Pearlman describes the performance as a multilingual opera, which will be shown in English, Yiddish, Chinese, Tamil and Xhosa. It deals with the question of how AI changes memories, drains their meaning and sometimes even erases them.

Note: The presentation will be held in English with simultaneous written translation into German. The presentation contains sensitive content and is only suitable for children if accompanied by a parent. Free admission.