Schmiede ’19

Just back from attending Schmiede in Austria – a ten day long event that revolves around creating a self-organising space for creative collaboration in art, music and digital media. The event takes place in an impressive building on an island in the town of Hallein that used to be a salt factory. Around 150 attendees worked on a huge variety of projects over the ten days, culminating in a work show on the final night.

I was invited over by Martin Murer, from Salzburg University’s Centre for Human-Computer Interaaction and joining by Jordi Solsona from KTH, Stockholm. Together we worked on a variety of ideas around how machine learning and artificial intelligence could fit into the early stages of design ideation. For the work show we created a “Schmiede Project Generator” which traded project ideas for Schmiede 2020 with the audience. By feeding the AI project ideas you helped train the data and a wider variety of unexpected ideas were generated. By the end of the night the AI had been fairly well corrupted with projects based around beer, wurst and cheese.