While many decision makers in Germany still stick to their traditional idea of supposedly serious public media and refer to a selected few other news outlets, mainly perceived either as newspapers, weeklies or websites as "lead media", i.e. the "Spiegel", "FAZ", "SZ" or Welt", the social media sphere seems to have become increasingly important for the public agenda. There, ever more actors - despite of their journalistic training or professional background - publish, distribute and facilitate content as news that often turns out as being either "fake news" or at least poorly investigated. With this communications lab we strive to practically demonstrate how one can stage, publish and facilitate news "at will". Everybody involved in publishing, journalism, media, politics or simply the public discourse is invited to contribute actively to this experiment. Let´s find out how far we can get a piece of "news" out of META within 42 hours?

With the so called "internet of everything" spreading into ever more realms of once human made infrastructure on planet earth such as living rooms - "Alexa", cars - "Hey Siri" but also the streetlights, train stations or the emergency room, we´ve got to note down that machines talk to each other and they talk about us. During a facebook experiment with bots trained to negotiate with human users in summer 2017 the bots suddenly started to derive from using language understandable by human beings into some kine of machine slang. They were stopped by their makers because there was no sense in machine babble as the bots were supposed to make better deals with advert buyers and so forth. Yet as machines also transport sensitive matters about ourselves or we simply might like to stay competent in making a difference between talking to a human being or a bot, we might like to sharpen our senses - if possibe - and find out how to eventually find out whom we´re actually talking to? With this machine language interpretation workshop we aim at raising awareness for the kinds of situations in which we already deal with bots today knowingly or unknowingly, get a clue about potential hints that we might read once we´re aware they exist and thereby create a better understanding of what it means to live in the "internet of everything"?

VR is on the rise - we get it. Hundreds of millions in funding flow into this augmentation technology to the human sight and imagination. Art, porn, blended learning, film, gaming and many other applications are already growing this tech´s utilisation to economically critical mass. Yet one crucial quality still seems to be unsolved: virtual emotional presence. Once we need the "chemistry check" with another human being, we still prefer to undergo massive stress and investment to travel i.e. half the world, if necessary instead of simply meeting in VR. Why is that? With this lab we´d like to shed some light onto the missing factors for virtual emotional presence and take a look at the most promising leads to get there. Maybe - just maybe - we can create a minute of genuine virtual emotional presence and make somebody genuinely cry?

Computer and the network are (ab)used to create art and combine its multiple forms. But can bots curate exhibitions? Can bots decide what is good and bad art? How would an exhibition curated by machines look like?

"The age of privacy is over" declared Marc Zuckerberg a while ago. And there seems to be something to this thesis as ever more personal data is gathered and the deal of "date against convenience" especially seems to be a one, fairly well thought after. The 2017 movie "the circle" has painted a picture of "total transparency" and left many with a bad taste in their mouths. So please - can we design a scenario of "total transparency" and find out what that actually would mean for our lives both individually as well as collectively?

Okay, we´ve maybe seen this movie and a couple of others - "altered carbon" for instance, a netflix sci-fi series about a society that has fully embraced transhumanism to an extend rarely imaginable today: the richest simply don´t have to die any longer. As "meths" they live forever transplanting their memories and soul into ever changing "shells" of human flesh and blood. But what the heck is going on underneath the hood of the so called "cyborg movement" or "transhumanism" today? Who are the people pushing the boundaries? What can one actually do already today? According to MIT Technology Review, the president of Y Combinator Sam Altman is one of 25 people who have put down a $10,000 refundable deposit to join a waiting list at Nectome — a company whose sole purpose is "the goal of archiving your mind." There's just one, rather huge catch: They have to kill you first. Like, literally kill you. Let´s with this lab define an update on what options human beings have today in the year 2018 on transforming eventually into something else?

Drawing with Sound is a durational performance project which turns the act of drawing into a musical instrument, made with composer Ben Heim from the Royal College of Music. I trained a neural net to recognise shapes that recur in my life-drawing sketches. While performing a pair of glasses with a webcam attached recognises shapes which trigger recordings of a soprano. The performance occurs over a period of time, with the track drawn in charcoal on a white wall and then erased, echoing the repetitions that a machine learning programme goes through in different epochs when training and learning. It is limited in so much as it only works with looking through the specially designed glasses. However as many people can watch the performance and then use the glasses to "replay" the music.

Remember the slogan: "occupy wallstreet"? It´s about ten years ago that protesters set up camp in downtown Manhattan after the so called "crash" in 2008. Ever since the world has gotten much more polarized and income more unevenly distributed. 1% of 1% of the global population own the planet - literally. And we don´t know fuck about these people. No, that´s not true: we know they´re buying up remote strips of land, preferably somewhere high up in the mountains or on islands - where they can simply get away from the mess that awaits the rest of humanity when climate change, the orange monkey or AI strike for the most of us. But here´s the thing: most of us in are part of at least the 1%. With this workshop we find out our individual rank amongst the richest of the planet and develop some scenarios describing likely behavorial ways once one takes a minority but powerful perspective. What can we learn about ourselves? What choices do we make - tomorrow but also on a daily base?

In the context of a society that progressively automates human labour, we all have become data workers. Our production of data is exploited by private companies and nation states for different purposes. The end game of these dynamics is the training of AI -making us unknowingly the workers that are developing it. Consequently, the exploitation of data that we are subject to poses structural threats to the fabric of society ranging from political manipulation, over issues of health, to training military drone programmes. The installation Data Production Labour proposes a structural response to position ourselves as workers instead of users as a way to gain ownership of the production of data, in which lays the future of human civilization.
During the workshop we will examine these issues and discuss different approaches to respond to them: Should data be owned by individuals? Or should we commonise data as a public good?

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Debate while running: Participants can run one round around the NRW-Forum with Thomas Geisel, Lord Mayor of Düsseldorf, and discuss the current challenges of artificial intelligence. Please bring your sport gear and a towel. There is also a possibility to shower afterward.

Sustainable Playing — having fun solving human challenges, improving our lives. When work becomes fun and fun is useful. The Sustainable impact of intelligent fun and play. Gamifying work making it fun and useful! Can play and fun contribute to sustainability?

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Artist Talk - One hour maximum. The artists present at the PENDORAN VINCI exhibition talk about their work. Presented by the two curators Tina Sauerländer and Peggy Schoenegge. The audience can ask questions at any time.

Here, vacuum cleaner robots drive over the screen. Whoever can hold out longest before he runs out of juice wins. Let's feed'em paint! Let's spur them on! Let's bet! Let's just sit back and watch: Is every robot an artist? Do the coincidences in the algorithm already result in an artist's soul? Can one robot replace up to 20 artists in the future?

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In this AI-Design Sprint you will create AI solutions that change companies or even transform industries. You will use analog tools like the AI-Canvas and AI-Card Deck, which make the AI-Design Sprint to a hands-on and playful experience. No prior AI knowledge or design experience necessary. We want people to understand the value they can deliver through AI.

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Play the Turing Test is a performance aiming to question the different interpretations of what it means to be human and what it means to be an AI. The performance consists of 2 short scripts acted out by 4 groups in front of an audience. Each group will be given one of two scripts: one generated by a computer and the other written by a human. Each group will then be asked to act out the script in one of two ways – either as human actors or as AIs. The audience will then try to guess which group had which combination i.e. who was acting out the AI generated text as human actors and who was acting the same script as AIs (and the other way around!). The aim of the performance is to explore how gesture, intonation, acting and intent influence our perception of what is an AI and what is a human.

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