Eyeless in Digital Gaza: Eryk Salvaggio sifts through the debris of our AI age in which we can no longer trust anything we see

EPISODE 1913: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to new media artist Eryk Salvaggio who sifts through the debris of an AI age in which we can no longer trust anything we see

Eryk Salvaggio is an interdisciplinary design researcher and new media artist. His work explores emerging technologies through a critically engaged lens, testing their mythologies and narratives against their impacts on social and cultural ecosystems. His work, which focuses on generativity and artificial intelligence, often exposes the ideologies embedded into technologies. His work has been curated into film and music festivals, gallery installations, and conferences (such as DEFCON 31 and SXSW). The work interrogates generative AI through a blend of cybernetics, visual culture & media theory, with a critique grounded in resistance and creative misuse, highlighting the gaps that emerge between the analog and digital, such as datasets and the world they claim to represent. Eryk has since worked with partners including AIxDesign’s Story & Code program, the AI Village at DEFCON 31, Space10, the Australian National University, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Internet Archive, and the National Gallery of Australia. His work has been published in academic journals such as Leonardo, Communications of the ACM, IMAGE, Patterns, and by art publishers including DAHJ Gallery, the Furtherfield gallery (London), Turbulence (Boston), Rhizome (New York) and 10th Floor Design Studios (San Francisco). His artwork has been included in pieces with the BBC4, The New York Times, ArtForum, NBC News, Neural, Dirty, and Mute Magazine. His work has been exhibited at Michigan State University Science Museum, the UN Internet Governance Forum, Eyebeam, CalArts, Brown University, Turbulence, The Internet Archive, and in books including Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais’ At the Edge of Art, Alex Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, and Peter Langford’s Image & Imagination. He has presented talks, keynotes and works at SXSW, DEFCON 31, the Systems Research & Design Conference (RSD10&11), the Advances in Systems Sciences and Systems Practice Conference (2022), Melbourne Design Week (2021), MIT Press (2021), the University of St. Gallen (2018), California College of the Arts (2018, 2019, 2020), the University of Maine, RightsCon (2020), and Gensler San Francisco (2017). As a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at Brown University, he created the article on Algorithmic Bias in 2016. Eryk has taught at the Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, RIT, and Bradley Universities, and has given talks or lectures at NYU, the University of Cambridge, Aarhus, the University of Copenhagen, and Northeastern. He holds a Masters in Media and Communication from the London School of Economics and a Masters in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University. He earned two concurrent undergraduate degrees, in New Media and Journalism, from the University of Maine, where he was listed as visiting faculty as an undergraduate based on his early interactive, online net.art work.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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