ROBERTO  FUSCO

"I am sure that people's awareness about our home Earth and nature has grown over time to such extent that we have understood our life depends on neighboring planets so if anything goes wrong up there then things could also go awry here on earth So I am optimistic regarding this new era when we better understand how important neighborly relations are among nations as well as between peoples across the globe and between us humans and other inhabitants of this planet. In Finland it has been achieved quite rapidly these past few years even though it might not necessarily mean much in other parts of the world at all But perhaps now these neighboring countries have realized what neighborliness really means especially during these difficult times therefore everyone ought to try hard towards solutions first before hostilities begin. If you ask me what issues will dominate globally at 2052 then I believe this concept called "neighborliness"."

GPT-3 fine-tuned with "A psalm for the wild-built" by Becky Chambers

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Tuning into the future is a sound walk where the audience can discover hidden pirate radios scattered in the city of Kuopio. We have been interviewing the participants of the workshops to address questions about the future of the economy, ecology, and automation, as well as personal desires and speculations attached to specific places in the city. Fusco has used the entire text-based dataset combined with excerpts from the Solar punk novella "A psalm for the wild-built" by Becky Chambers, to train a neural network to generate alternative answers. The machine-made text has been edited together with the original answers to create site-specific “scripts”, a possible conversation between human and machine that did not happen yet.

Located in key places of the city and marked on a provided map, those radios will broadcast a human and artificial soundscape. People will be able to listen to the workshop participants in dialogue with a voice interpreting the AI-generated text. The trained network will help us tune in to both what is already in the given answers but not yet formulated, and also to imaginative unspoken horizons.

Use the FM radio to tune into the radio station indicated on the map.

Credits

Tuning into the future is one of the works emerging from the Shared Futures - project, a long-term, multiform collaboration where we reflect on and try to find a sense of the future with a group of 60 + participants in weekly workshops. We explore their hometown Kuopio and imagine how it will be in 100 years from now.

The Shared Futures workshops are part of the IKO Cultural Wellbeing for Older People project that promotes the welfare of older people through art. The project is funded by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and it is implemented in cooperation with the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Theatre Centre, the Culture for All service and the Aili network. In Kuopio, ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival is responsible for the implementation of the IKO project.