Sôhkêpayin (ᓲᐦᑫᐸᔨᐣ)

Is a Cree word meaning:

It is strong, it works Effectively, (e.g. machine, medicine)

The Sôhkêpayin project joins human innovation with the gifts of the natural world. The long-term goal of this project is to develop an AI model that uses real data from the environment to create new outputs, including visualizations that highlight the complex connections found in nature. This process will inspire new artwork focused on the four elements: earth, water, air and fire.

This Indigenous-led initiative combines AI with environmentalism and Indigenous ways of knowing to help build a better future. Baerg has recruited a team of Indigenous contributors to inform this international, multi-year project.

Current and Upcoming Projects

Japan, 2022

In 2022, we will travel to Japan to have ceremony and collaborate with Indigenous Ainu artists to create collaborative A.I. driven artworks.

A.I. Tutorials

Machine learning Foundations 5 part series by Ryan Kelln.

Asaimina, 2020-21

Asaimîna ᐊᓴᐃᒼ ᐄᓇ All Over Again, (2020) is a generative new media projection piece that negotiates abstract spaces and places through a multiplicity of circular notions to contemplate direction. Sensing, intuiting, or knowing comes from understanding and are dynamic concepts that describe the continuum of a sequence of embodied experiences. Asaimîna ᐊᓴᐃᒼ ᐄᓇ All Over Again activates the local and cosmological to serve as a digital compass for our future. The reward for interactivity is that abstractions appear. Abstractions are landscape inspired which also include Cree syllabics that also reference place. Audio interactivity triggers changes in the soundscape as the participant moves the cursor with the rolly ball to the north, where the sound of the wind occur. If the cursor is moved to the south, the sounds of waves break.

If you move the cursor to the East where the sun rises, crackles of fire are summoned and if the cursor is moved to the west, sounds of tectonic plates rumble. The central orb is comprised of four stacked transparent video channels, which are composites produced by the animated outcomes of experiments made by feeding images in AI software of Indigenous trees to the local area in Tkaronto, representing the dense forest that once lived here, with current images of this city.

Made in collaboration with Jason Baerg, Ryan Kelln, Kyle Duffield, & Kristy Boyce.

Key Partners

The Ontario Science Centre is one of the first interactive science museums in the world

Sôhkêpayin is an ongoing participatory project by the Ontario Science Centre’s 2021-22 artist-in-residence, Jason Baerg. The long-term goal of this Indigenous-led project is to develop an AI model that uses real data from the environment to create new outputs, including visualizations that emphasize the complex connections found in nature. 
 

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) is the federal research funding agency that promotes and supports research and training in the humanities and social sciences.

The Canada Council fulfills its mandate primarily through providing grants and services to professional Canadian artists and arts organizations in dance, interdisciplinary art, media arts, music, opera, theatre, writing, publishing, and the visual arts. In addition, the Canada Council administers the Art Bank, which operates art rental programs and an exhibitions and outreach program. The Canada Council Art Bank holds the largest collection of contemporary Canadian art in the world. The Canada Council is also responsible for the secretariat for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and the Public Lending Right Commission.[1][2]

OCAD University is Canada’s “university of imagination.” The University, founded in 1876, is dedicated to art and design education, practice and research and to knowledge and invention across a wide range of disciplines. OCAD University is building on its traditional, studio-based strengths, adding new approaches to learning that champion cross-disciplinary practice, collaboration and the integration of emerging technologies. In the Age of Imagination, OCAD University community members will be uniquely qualified to act as catalysts for the next advances in culture, technology and quality of life for all Canadians

Founded in 1827, the University of Toronto is Canada’s top ranked research university with a long history of challenging the impossible and transforming society through the ingenuity and resolve of its faculty, students, alumni and supporters.