Wesley Goatley

Only 10 likes is a damning indictment of this website

Some upcoming winter talks in Berlin, Cambridge, and Amsterdam this month:

much look forward to speaking about "regenerative data cultures" at "Human Machine: Soil, Sound, Memory" symposium at Akademie der Künste in Berlin 🪱🌱🍂🔊✨ jonathangray.org/2025/11/07/r... with @wesleygoatley.bsky.social @tamigraph.bsky.social @jenniferwalshe.bsky.social & many more! 🍵💜

The evening of the September 20th will feature a performance of my short film FIVE ECHOES, featuring a live score of dissected and recomposed AI assistant voices. Details here: luga.lu/en/experienc...

This weekend my next work opens in Luxembourg: PLACE ECHOES, five sound sculptures made from 50 discarded smart speakers and half a tonne of soil. Each sculpture features voices from the speakers reading short eco-socio-technical fiction about near futures with and without this consumer trash.

The third is The Hope, which asks the question 'What if we thought of AI not as Artificial Intelligence but as Assistive Interface instead? What would this change mean for pur expectations of the tech, what it should do, who it should serve?

The second is The Horizon, which asks the question 'What if the current age of computational abundance comes to an end, and a lone engineer attempted to build a low powered AI assistant out of the scraps of the failed AI-age?'

The first of the three fully interactive devices is The Harbinger, which asks the question 'What if Palantir deepened their relationship with the NHS to "solve" it's crises by creating and deploying a medical smart assistant to replace GPs and "automate care"?'

My new installation A Harbinger, A Horizon, and A Hope: Three Heralds of Possible AI Futures is now open at Inspace Gallery in Edinburgh for the Edinburgh Festival.

It's three interactive devices each showing a glimpse at a different future for individuals and communities and their relation to AI.

10 days after this, Keir Starmer announced a drive to 'increase efficiency' in the NHS through, amongst other things, recommending that GPs use AI systems to transcribe their speech and notes.

I designed this to be a fully functional and interactive device, and runs entirely locally with no data centers in its operation. Commissioned by @braiduk.bsky.social. First exhibited two weeks ago at The Lowry in Manchester.

It's a desktop device and voice interface that listens to all patient & GP conversations, sends the info to a Palantir data center, and then returns a 'smart, AI-powered' diagnosis, without the opinion of the GP, whose only role now is to inspect the patient and report their findings to the system.

This is The Harbinger, a new installation posting the question: what if Palantir continued and deepened their relationship with the NHS, and made their technology the center of a new era of 'automated care'? It's an 'AI GPs Assistant', deployed to every GP surgery in the UK.

10 days after this, Keir Starmer announced a drive to 'increase efficiency' in the NHS through, amongst other things, recommending that GPs use AI systems to transcribe their speech and notes.

I designed this to be a fully functional and interactive device, and runs entirely locally with no data centers in its operation. Commissioned by @braiduk.bsky.social. First exhibited two weeks ago at The Lowry in Manchester.

It's a desktop device and voice interface that listens to all patient & GP conversations, sends the info to a Palantir data center, and then returns a 'smart, AI-powered' diagnosis, without the opinion of the GP, whose only role now is to inspect the patient and report their findings to the system.

This is The Harbinger, a new installation posting the question: what if Palantir continued and deepened their relationship with the NHS, and made their technology the center of a new era of 'automated care'? It's an 'AI GPs Assistant', deployed to every GP surgery in the UK.

❤️ Wish you could be there friend!

I specifically wanted to expose the connections between spurious AI use and academic institutions who want to reduce their carbon footprint, and the frequent incompatibility of this. Which included critiquing AI art that pretends to care about Nature.

I've been talking more in education contexts about critical and ethical approaches to both teaching AI and in using those tools in teaching. You can see my most recent talk from the Digital Learning and the Environment conference in London here: ual.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Page...

Oooo, thank you old friend!

I gave some hostile examples from other practices as well as proposotional ones from my own practice of what an anti-capitalist AI art can look like, including some new work coming later this year. I believe there's a recording of the talk coming down the pipeline soon.

My talk last night at the Edinburgh Futures Institute for the Doing AI Differently salon was about 'Doing AI Art Differently' , specifically why we should want to counter the normative practices that mislead audiences into believing techno-capitalism's favourite myth of machine intelligence.

Plus Haunted Machines feat. @ndkane.bsky.social

My latest substack is called I Don't Want OpenAI to Support The Arts, I Want Them To Stay The Fuck Away From It', which was a mini essay I wrote to support a group of artists who rejected OpenAI's offer of free access to the Sora tool in exchange for endorsements. Link to the full post is in my bio.

Former head of NSA joins OpenAI board Another new board member.

The intimacy of the AI field to the military is obviously long and deep, the ex-head of the NSA being appointed to the board of directors of OpenAI is not a surprise www.theverge.com/2024/6/13/24...

75 Years of Innovation: CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) - SRI A research project that developed an enduring personalized cognitive assistant

This had a custom fully functional voice assistant that never said please and acted as a 'battlefield assistant', as per the early origins of Siri as the in-helmet assistant CALO www.sri.com/75-years-of-...

Doing some new work on where art practice can meaningfully probe into hidden systems, thinking back to Echo REIGN, a project I made in 2018 proposing what Amazon's work in making voice assistants for the US military might look like (shown at Glassroom San Francisco for Tactical Tech)

In the studio today, developing a new series of works memorialising the de-valued and discarded artifacts of extractive capitalism.

#9: There is No Ethical Use of Any OpenAI Tool Ars Electronica's award of an OpenAI commissioned project, and where resistance is needed.

A recent substack I wrote on how Ars Electronica's recent AI prize winner looks very much like a sponsored OpenAI plant, and how arts orgs cannot ethically promote these tools: wesleygoatley.substack.com/p/9-there-is...