ROB LAW UNBOXED

It is Studio Alight’s goal to reframe, conceptualize and contextualize the seemingly unexplained, and AI and machine-learning technology is a technology that already impacts our societies to degrees that are, currently, unknown by the general population. This unknowingness is easily turned into a form of terror with rhetorics played out in the media claiming that robots are coming to change our world. Yet, who is making these robots? We [humans] are.

And hence, the work of Studio Alight intends to shed light on this fact and to empower more people to engage with this technology within the general population. We aim to entice an audience to approach these systems with the realization that they, too, can understand. That the code is not codified into the impossible to comprehend, but instead, is part of being a citizen of our contemporary society. Hence, this proposed work intends to reveal to our democratic population the powers that play within the use of our novel technologies. In turn, we aim to create a discussion space that informs our society to demand regulations that protect and enforce the rights we each have while collaborating with digital technologies. We have become both accustomed to and afraid of these technologies and are currently catapulting us into an even more computational and digital future(s).

To meet the above-mentioned goal, we propose a series of works including an installation piece and video work, ROB LAW UNBOXED. This work will consist of (1) a robotic lawmaker sculpture that writes new laws and was trained from the laws previously written by the lawmakers manifested as a sculpture. And, (2) a play on the trend of ‘unboxing’ videos found on the internet and will be a form of documenting the unboxing of the seemingly black-boxed technology of artificial intelligence (AI).

LAW UNBOXED is a follow-up piece to the exhibition, shown at ICIA Konsthall (2019). It expands upon the work created within this solo exhibition and proposes to bring our collaborative creations that meet at the crossroads of art, tech, and law to a broader audience. The public of this work is broad in its reach as it is meant to reach and create a discussion of the technology that affects our society in ways that are currently masked by capitalists and corporations for profit.