eVe_ noun \ ˈēv \
Definition
: the first woman, the wife of Adam, and the
mother of Cain and Abel
: Eve symbolizes the "human soul"
: the evening or day before an important event
eVe is the origin.
The beginning of a new attitude in tech.
The dawn of art thinking.
eVe is a new annual award by The Grid.
eVe celebrates collaborative artworks that
push the envelope of human and artificial creativity.
Art is the energy powering our greatest human aspirations. It reminds us of who we are and unravels the truth behind our perception of the world. Art can make us think and understand the inner workings of our tools and creations by unveiling the essence of technology.
Artists and technologists create realities that often seem unlike. Yet we believe they both share the same ambition: To transcend our human limitations.
The Grid believes in a rightful place for art in technology. How can those two worlds intersect and learn from each other? The Grid sees a huge potential in the possibilities for highly effectual and powerful technologies to grow in dialogue with artists. We believe that a conversation needs to be started that can develop a mutual understanding between both worlds.
eVe is a new annual award by The Grid. It honors
outstanding collaborative artworks that show
the potential of interdisciplinary experimentation
between artists and technologists to positively
influence the research and development of new
technologies.
eVe looks for artistic collaborations and artworks
that repurpose technologies from their intended
applications and fill them with new meaning. We
are searching for projects that uncover
technology’s hidden strengths, point to unforeseen
outcomes, and open up new perspectives, while
also acknowledging its downsides and unintended
consequences.
eVe wants to encourage art that contributes to a more humane and inclusive technology.
selected project 2021:
AI Storytelling
by Daniel Kehlmann (AT/DE) and Bryan McCann (US)
"The storyteller began to put forth words, not because he thought others might reply with other, predictable words, but to test the extent to which words could fit with one another, could give birth to one another..." - Italo Calvino, Cybernetics and Ghosts.
Storytelling connects us with each other and our world. We channel ourselves through language in ways that span temporal and spatial divides, and our use of language creates a trove of meaning waiting to be examined. This project brought together two storytellers: Daniel Kehlmann, renowned German-language novelist and playwright, and Bryan McCann, a philosopher and scientist of natural language. Together, they explored the role that artificial intelligence tools called language models might play in storytelling. Language models are trained to predict which words are most likely to occur given a prompt from the user -- the words, to borrow Calvino's phrase, likely to "give birth to one another." McCann had designed a new language model called CTRL to give users more control over the AI text generation process. Working together, Kehlmann and McCann explored a novel mode of storytelling that integrates AI as a collaborator. While CTRL generated suggestions based on internalized statistical patterns of language use, Kehlmann deftly wove those suggestions together, at times cutting them, diverting them, or subverting them, in order to "test the extent to which words could fit with one another." By offering a mechanism to defamiliarize well-worn patterns of language, this story of AI Storytelling produced moments of surprise, laughter, disappointment, and inspiration. In doing so, it contributes to a broader narrative of how AI might be used as a tool of self-reflection, allowing us to investigate our language, our stories, our histories, and ourselves.
Daniel Kehlmann is an Austro-German novelist and playwright. His works have won the Candide Prize, the Hölderlin Prize and the Thomas Mann Prize. He was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2016–17. His last novel “Tyll” was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and is currently being adapted as a TV show for Netflix.
Bryan McCann is currently Co-founder and CTO at You.com building a new search experience. Previously, he was a Lead Research Scientist at Salesforce Research in Palo Alto where he worked on Deep Learning and its applications to Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Understanding. His research focused on transferring knowledge between AI systems, creating AI that is more general and unified in the way that it approaches natural language tasks, and AI that can generate sequences of symbols -- both with words, as in English, but also with amino acids, as in proteins -- based on input specifications from a user. He obtained an M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science focusing on Artificial Intelligence as well as a B.A in Philosophy from Stanford University.
The ceremony will be preceded by a panel discussion with prominent representatives from big tech, policy, the arts, and cultural diplomacy, outlining the vision behind the eVe award as well as opportunities for all stakeholders.
Prize Money: 10,000 USD