What impact will artificial intelligence (AI) have on media, arts and design? Which case studies already exist? What examples are to be found in the past? And how will the future look like?

These were among others the key-questions of the MAD | AI 2020 Conference.

After the successful “Media, Arts & Design | Blockchain Conference” in May, the committee decided to plan another conference at short notice. This time on the topic AI. More than 160 participants from all parts of the world took part in the online conference “Media, Arts & Design | AI” on June 19, 2020 and used the unique opportunity for direct exchange with internationally renowned speakers.

In addition to the history of Artificial Intelligence, its use in digital games or in museums was explained, the interplay between music analysis and Artificial Intelligence or its significance for film and comics was presented, and development potential was presented. In an interdisciplinary discourse, the topics of ethics and morals were also approached.

The videos of the conference:

A detailed overview of the individual presentations is available at www.mad-conferences.com.

On the YouTube channel of the applied game studies centre you can watch the entire stream and the individual lectures.

Knowledge from first-hand sources:

The speakers came from institutions such as Harvard University, the Austrian Institute of Technology, the Alpen-Adria-University, the University of Malta, MIT, the St. Martins Institute of Higher Education, Donau-University Krems, the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of Vaasa and Texas A&M University. Non-university contributions came from Seewald Solutions, NinjaMoba or Scifiinterfaces.com, among others.

The participants in the conference came from the German-speaking countries, including Austria, Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland, as well as from other European countries, including Malta and Italy, but also from the USA and Asia.

About the conference:

The conference “Media, Arts & Design | AI 2020” was organized by the Center for Applied Game Studies of  Donau-University Krems together with the Department of Artificial Intelligence of University of Malta and the Department of Digital Media of Drexel University in Philadelphia. Further partners of the online conference were the MIT Education Arcade of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the LIVE LAB of Texas A&M University and the Department of Communication Studies of the University of Vaasa. Organizationally, the conference was a giant effort, as the initiator of the conference Alexander Pfeiffer currently working as a postdoc at MIT on a Max Kade scholarship, explains: “We planned the sister conference Media, Arts & Design | Blockchain with a preparation time of several months and then held it online because of COVID-19. Inspired by this success, the partners of this conference created  the ‘Media, Arts & Design | AI’ within only seven weeks. Even though it was a very risky project, the success proves us right and we are looking forward to the coming year”. As an online event, it also offered something new for the speakers. “It was very exciting to answer questions while listening to our own pre-recorded video, very efficient, well done and, despite the online nature of the event, a good opportunity for networking,” said Univ.-Prof. Wilfried Elmenreich, University of Klagenfurt, who gave a keynote speech on “Retrocomputing as Inspiration for Designing Games”.

Upcoming anthologies:

The publications for both conferences are already in preparation: The anthology on the Blockchain conference will be published by the Donau-University Krems, the anthology on the AI conference will be published in the Springer-series “Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing”.