Luisa Charles is an Interaction Designer, Multimedia Artist, and Design Engineer based in London. Much of her work exists at the intersections of art, design, science, and technology, and she has been exhibited in the UK’s Science Museum, The National Science Museum of Thailand, Science Gallery London, the London Design Festival, and more.
Her current practice focuses on the emancipatory potential, ethical concerns, and creative and unconventional uses of autonomous technologies, such as robotics and artificial intelligence.
Luisa graduated in 2022 with a double Master’s degree in Global Innovation Design at the Royal College of Art and the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London.
“With work that spans the intersections of art, design, science, and technology, I define myself as a media-agnostic Design Engineer, a thinker, maker, and provocateur. My work attempts to tackle big, complex, and controversial topics in a playful, interactive, and digestible way - seeking to spark conversation and find unconventional solutions to abstract problems. I prioritise research processes, allowing my work to form itself organically through investigation and experimentation, and use various creative media as a driver for sociopolitical change.”
Curation Projects
Gaea: A Garden of the 2nd and 3rd Dimensions (G:A GOT 2&3D) was an immersive exhibition Luisa designed and curated, showcasing 10 works from international artists and collectives, all working within the theme of techno-ethics and artificial intelligence. It was held in New York City in 2021 and invited audiences into a liminal garden space on the cusp between the digital and physical worlds.
Exhibition Poster
The first project within the G:A GOT 2&3D collection culminated in a virtual reality exhibition of AI-generated artwork. It began as an exploration into creating frameworks for abstract projects - without any concrete context, media, theme, or methodology.
Whilst delving into computational creativity, Luisa set up an experiment with the following hypothesis:
By positioning the designer/artist as the curator and the muse, can one reasonably argue that Artificial Intelligence has become an artist or creator within its own right?
Project Overview
"As creative accountability for this piece, I positioned my own work as the inspiration for the AI. The first step of the algorithm was to feed a list of my previous project names and descriptions to a GPT-2 based programme, and get it to generate more names and descriptions that sound like things that I have worked on but do not exist. This is how the name Gaea: A Garden of the 2nd and 3rd Dimensions was born."
Then, Luisa expanded her curation practice and called upon international artists to enter works within the theme of techno-ethics and artificial intelligence into the curation, G:A GOT 2&3D, focusing on working out the ethical frameworks from which these technologies should be held accountable before humans experience the disasters and traumas caused by our current technologies and lifestyles – not afterward.
“We have arrived at a crossroads. For the last 10 years, tech companies have been running covert social experiments on users that have negatively altered their moods, stealing and selling user data in order to influence democratic processes, and creating facial recognition software to help put immigrant children in cages.
Technology has been developing at an unparalleled pace, and has led to genuine, real world harm. And this is because, put simply, no one has decided that exploiting people for profits is wrong, and put rules and regulations in place to prevent this from happening. ”
G:A GOT 2&3D took place in Brooklyn, New York City on December 11th & 12th, 2021. 10 projects selected from 75 submissions around the globe were exhibited, including projects of artificial intelligence, robotics, and new media being used or speculatively used for purposes assisting in the mitigation of social injustices; projects that highlight ethical issues and implications in the use of AI, robotics, and new media; projects aiming to push the limits of new technologies in creative, abstract, or unconventional ways; and artworks, music, and games in which AI plays a part in the creative process.
Selected Works
Luisa Charles
Exhibition Guide
Gaea: A Garden of the 2nd & 3rd Dimensions
Visitors engaging with the projetcs
Visitors engaging with the projetcs
Exhibited projects
G:A GOT 2&3D also included a very creative feedback mechanism, allowing visitors to express their curiosity, concerns, and confusion with the artwork by stacking corresponding discs on the wooden stands.
Engagement discs
Vistors' feedback
Credits:
Organiser and Creative Director: Luisa Charles
Curators: Cheska Lotherington, Amruta Supate, Angela Dall’Acqua, Kevin Lee
Spatial and Interaction Design: Angela Dall’Acqua, Stephanie Halim, Hillary Law
Graphics, Branding, and Communication: Raphaël Smith, Joe Hoole, Yushu Yang, Amruta Supate, Kim Anh
Events: Yurie Suzuki
Exhibition Guide Design: Yushu Yang, Raphaël Smith
Special thanks to MIKA, Matte Nyberg, Colin Charles, Matt Hoskin, Susan M Bennett, Jill Charles, Yurie Suzuki, Amy Jiang, Miryana Ivanova, Lucio Martus, Nikki Bennett, Maddy Gardiner, Peter Charles, Melissa Svensen, Ruth Clark Wilkins, Coral Richards, Cheska Lotherington, Michael Fearon, J Whitehead, Christopher Laraspata, Helena Charles.