Support Emergence Delft to get to Dutch Design Week!
Help Emergence Delft get to Dutch Design Week!
We are Emergence Delft. One of the TU Delft Dream Teams since September of this academic year. We are a team consisting of 29 students from TU Delft and art academies such as the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and from the Design Academy Eindhoven. Together we try to shine light on the impact of complex technologies on our daily lives.
How do we shine this light?
Have you ever started a game without knowing the rules? After round two you often understand how the game works without knowing all the pages of the rulebook. This is the approach we use to explain complex topics such as Quantum mechanics and Artificial Intelligence. We believe that by experiencing these phenomena, they can be better understood than by reading about them.
Emergence sees art as the ultimate means of conveying complex messages. After all, an art installation does not have a particular language with a jargon. However, our installations only have impact when we can exhibit them. Besides organizing our own events in which we show our art, we also want to do this at Dutch Design Week. The biggest design event in Northern Europe with more than 350 000 visitors that will take place in mid-October.
What will we show at the Dutch Design Week?
We are currently working on two installations. One will focus on communicating Quantum Technology. Quantum is a word everyone has heard of, but few people really understand. We recognize that this technology is going to have a dire impact on our future and feel it is important that it be brought to our attention. Under the guidance of QuTech, a research institute for quantum computing and quantum internet at TU Delft, we are developing an installation that will teach visitors some form of intuition about Quantum Technology and the impact it will have on our daily lives.
We are also working on a research project about communicating Algorithms. Algorithms are something we encounter every day; almost everyone currently uses ChatGPT or Google Maps at one time or another. In this project, we are collaborating with 4DSOUND, an organization that innovates in sound technology. Using this spatial sound technology, we are doing curiosity-driven research on how we can use this medium to communicate the complexity of algorithms.
Help us get to Dutch Design Week!
We are busy in the development phase of our projects. The biggest goal of our projects is to expose these complex technologies; not only among people who already know about them, but especially among people who don't. Help us exhibit our art installations to the 350,000 people who visit Dutch Design Week. Help us make people think about what technologies they use today and what would happen if this were to change or disappear!
- Emergence Delft
The total is greater than the sum of its components
The annual New Media Project has a mission-driven focus. It consists of both a research and development phase. The research phase, which runs from February to July, aims to create a new artistic medium that builds upon the current research at TU Delft.
The New Media Project 2 Research team is developing a groundbreaking artistic medium, rooted in the depths of quantum tech theory and ethics. This medium will not only push the boundaries of artistic expression bus also serve as a conduit for science communication. Through conceptualization and execution, the team aims to create a platform that not only educates but also inspires a broad public, briding the gap between art and science. By unblackboxing quantum phenomena, the medium will provide users with a more intuitive grasp of Quantum Mechanics, fostering curiosity and exploration, leaving a lasting impact on both the art world and the realm of quantum physics.
The Platform projects are entirely centered around curiosity-driven research. These projects explore the intersection of artistic and technical disciplines, providing a space for experimentation and discovery. Over the course of a single semester, all Platform project teams will complete a full research and development cycle.
In February of 2024, the Platform Project of Emergence 2 began working on a new project. The goal of this project was to use an innovative spatial sound system called 4DSOUND to make complex algorithmic technologies more intuitive. To be able to experience them. We elaborated on this goal by formulating a concrete problem to address:
The way AI systems interpret our world is unlike the way we do this ourselves. Though its results can be accurate, being aware of this difference is important.
When an AI system behaves ‘human-like’ in some specific task, it is easy to assume that it experiences the world in a ‘human’ way, which is to say similarly complete and generalized. This ascribes its competencies and understanding that it does not actually possess.
The way AI systems interpret our world is unlike the way we do this ourselves. Though its results can be accurate, being aware of this difference is important.
From this problem, we formulated a research question, the most important question we wanted to answer with our project:
How can we utilize the 4DSOUND system to shed a light on the inhuman way AI systems process information?
Within this framework we started experimenting with sound as a medium to tell these stories. Stories of algorithmic translation, interpretation, imagination. Below are a few of these explorations.
