Hay Festival Segovia 2022

This event invites us to explore reality and imagination from the perspective of speculative architect and filmmaker Liam Young. The artist will give a performative talk that, through his words and images, will transport us to real and imaginary worlds that invite us to examine our present and rethink our future. The talk will incorporate an exploration of the use of Artificial Intelligence through a conversation between Liam Young and young researcher Piera Riccio.

Artist Liam Young (Australia, 1979) works in a hybrid space where architecture and design, film, science and fiction intersect to generate powerful audio visual pieces that envision the risks and potential of new technologies. At a time when technological transformation seems to be happening faster than our ability to understand what the effects might be, the worlds that Young constructs invite us to explore their possible outcomes. In his own words, we don’t need more charts and graphs to show us what’s going wrong with the world, we need to dramatize data to get people emotionally engaged.

Liam Young's work has been exhibited in some of the world's leading exhibition spaces, including the MET, MoMA, the Royal Academy and the Venice Biennale. His pieces have also been broadcast on BBC and Channel 4 and he has been nominated for BAFTA awards. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and MIT and was on the faculty of the Strelka Institute until its closure.

The young researcher Piera Riccio is working on her doctoral thesis in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with the European ELLIS programme at the University of Alicante and a grant from the Banco Sabadell Foundation for the promotion of young talent. Riccio’s doctoral thesis deals with the social implications of the use of Artificial Intelligence algorithms in social networking platforms and how they are defining the flow of information in our society, thus establishing new paradigms of mass communication.

A herd of 400 Castilian sheep belonging to local shepherd Mr. Rafael Montes will be walked by Daudy and Novoselov to the area beneath the historic Roman aquaduct in Segovia, in a participatory performance proving the perfection of Einstein’s Unification Theory.

Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is a model in particle physics in which, at high energies, the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model comprising the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces are merged into a single force.

The sheep, each inscribed with SÍ or NO (YES or NO), will form random groups and arrangements, proving perfectly to us the possibility of individuals living peacefully together, however disparate their point of view.

The paint used to write the words on the sheep's coat is ecological and completely harmless to the animal.

A flock of sheep painted with numbers at Daudy and Novoselov’s recent WONDERCHAOS exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK caused a stir in the worlds of mathematics, science and engineering, by creating more random numbers in a month than there are atoms in this universe. As the sheep passed each other, thousands of different number combinations were created, forming in effect a living random number generator. A film by Daudy and directed by Gautier Deblonde illustrating this phenomenon, entitled ALTERNATIVE RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR: THE SHEEP OF MR. CHARLES PLATTS (2021), will also be premiered at the festival.

What do a refugee, a high-level politician and a carbon atom on the other side of the world have in common? All of them share the same pattern of existence. The prominent conceptual and multimedia artist Kate Daudy, who has worked on major international projects; and the scientist and artist Sir Konstantin Novoselov, winner of the 2010 Novel Prize for Physics, have been working since 2017 on a humanitarian art and science project whose goal is to explore the ways in which Everything Is Connected and to invite the public to reflect on these connections. Daudy and Novoselov, who will undertake an artistic intervention as part of the Hay Festival, believe that it is worth considering interconnection when assessing our behaviour: our lives are what our thoughts make them. They will talk at this event about their project, which has involved collaboration with different NGOs and institutions linked to humanitarian work in the context of aid and development cooperation.

They will talk to Javier Gila, chair of the Aida: Ayuda, Intercambio y Desarrollo association, who has been working with them on the project.

With simultaneous translation from English to Spanish and vice versa