davidastonart
ArtEvol 2025 / David Aston
Oracle II (from The New Oracles Series) , 2024 Mixed media 38 × 42.5 × 29.5 cm
David Aston is a British artist born in Edinburgh whose practice operates at the intersection of art, science and anthropology. Aston employs a research- based approach to examine humanity through a diachronic lens, exploring how technological determinism, digitisation and artificial intelligence influence societies and reshape human experience. In The New Oracles series, Aston integrates AI academic research into sculptural and digital simulators that gamify AI trajectories, societal risks and impacts. Further interests include the nature of time and environmental questions surrounding the Anthropocene and the future of species. Aston’s research often extends over years, informing medium and aesthetics through combinations of historical ready-mades, sculpted elements and digital technology such as interactive websites, simulators and curated feedback loops. By working across multiple themes in parallel, Aston encourages depth of material, interdisciplinary thinking and renewed perspectives on the shifts shaping past, present and future.
Artwork Introduction
Oracle II (from The New Oracles series) , titled Superintelligence: Existential Risks, Mitigations and Outcomes , is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) superintelligence future scenario simulator. An oracle and work of AI gamification, it simulates AI future scenarios using data from the latest research into AI existential risks, mitigations and impacts. It is the second in a series of sculptural and digital Oracle future prediction simulators. The first, Oracle (2020–21), was developed in response to anticipated progress in artificial intelligence. The project surveys expert opinion from the Future of Humanity Institute and gamifies dates for the realisation of human-level machine intelligence, superintelligence and potential outcomes for humanity. Oracle II is made from a deconstructed one-arm bandit manufactured in the same year as the Dartmouth conference, considered the birthplace of AI (1956). The machine’s elaborately cast and illuminated fittings have been removed, revealing its base metal, hand-cranked mechanical and clockwork inner workings. In this functional form, the machine shares its ancestry and aesthetic with earlier mechanical computing engines.
86
87
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter maker