Video: A Journey to Find the Soul of a Sailor

Designed to provide transformative AI-fuelled experiences for audiences, and to present works that address key challenges in AI, The New Real’s ‘Uncanny Machines’ project explores how artists can push creative boundaries, how AI can be enriched or challenged by the Arts and the social implications of recent developments in AI.

As part of this, UK-based Polish artist Kasia Molga, was commissioned to develop ‘How to Find the Soul of a Sailor’. Kasia spent her childhood travelling with her sailor father on merchant navy vessels. He passed away quite unexpectedly 15 years ago leaving diaries from his journeys. Her experiments using The New Real's AI platform use these and her memories to recreate stories in his voice and to bring a fresh perspective on the world's oceans that he travelled his entire life.

In this video, we explore the journey of the art commission from start to finish. Kasia reflects on the project, while The New Real Team discusses how her use of the platform and collaboration with data scientists has brought new perspectives to their research and how artists can help shape how AI interprets and understands environmental data and human and AI conceptual models and can interact to create new perspectives on climate impacted futures.

Artist: Kasia Molga

University of Edinburgh contributors: Prof Drew Hemment, Dr Matjaz Vidmar, Daga Panas, Bianca Proden, Courtney Bates, Pamela Wallace

Presented by: The New Real

Funded by: The Scottish AI Alliance

Filmmakers: Ciara Flint & Ivan Marevich

Cite as: Kasia Molga (2024). 'Video: A Journey to Find the Soul of a Sailor.' The New Real Magazine, Edition Two. pp 96-97. www.newreal.cc/magazine-edition-two/a-journey-to-find-the-soul-of-a-sailor