Prior Art Automaton (Installation) was made by the creative collective STUDIO ALIGHT, which consists of Samantha Hookway, Fredrik Garneij and Christofer Kanljung. The installation was a physical embodiment of the Studio’s previous work on paper exhibited in the Dutch Pavilion of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale and at the V&A during the London Design Festival under the project The Institute of Patent Infringement by Jane Chew and Matthew Stewart. Chew and Stewart described the Call for Entry of their collective project displayed in 2018 as: “The dubious world of intellectual property rights allows “Big Tech” multinationals to create a monopoly on ideas concerning automation. Focusing on the political dimension of labor, the Institute of Patent Infringement encourages architects [and designers] to appropriate the frameworks under which these multinationals operate, and subvert their patent drawings, revealing a possible radical and emancipatory potential inherent in these technological regimes, as well as a space where architecture [and design] can play a role.” And hence, this work, Prior Art Automaton (Installation) brings the drawing exhibited within Chew and Stewart’s context into the context of Sweden (and even Gothenburg, and even the neighborhood surrounding ICIA Konsthall, Ringön). The work is described via the studio’s website as: ”The work questions the fundamental principles around corporate utilization of intellectual property...In most systems of patent law, Prior art is constituted by all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent’s claim of originality. An automaton is a self-operating machine designed to automatically follow a predetermined sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions. For the Prior Art Automaton work, Studio Alight have used Artificial Intelligence and has designed a machine that prints, and thus, creates novelty, prior art, at a pace unachievable by humans. This protects smaller companies or individuals because they no longer need to compete with large global corporations in the system, a competition that would normally be experienced as that of David and Goliath.” As stated above, Prior Art within the Patent System is a very important and first step in the patenting process. To put it simply, Prior Art Automaton is a sculptural installation consisting of an automaton printing novelty, and this printed output is created by a neural network trained by a body of patent texts to write new novel texts. Within the installation there is also a directional speaker that reads the novelty out loud while you stand at the stream of prior arts. The voice made from another neural network trained with deep-learning techniques, such as the voice of Amazon Polly and etc. The Automaton has basically learned the patterns of how patent language is written by the patent system’s practitioners (because it was trained on this system’s output) and with this training it spits out new language. It does this faster than any of us humans could ever do. This notion is expanded by the accompanying Rob Law exhibition text created by ICIA Konsthall: The automaton takes away the possibility to have patents that can be used in infringement. The availability of this prior art protects smaller companies or individuals because they no longer need to compete with large global corporations in the system, a competition that would normally be experienced as that of David and Goliath. This is the end of patents as we know it. Now, that last statement – it is rather bold. Yet, even so, this work is bringing up the concern that is bubbling up in our world where things are shifting into being made by machines, machines with “minds” of some sort. And we humans must reflect on how we train those machines and the ethics around these machines doing the job that has historically always been inherently human. Questions come up such as: Who owns these machines? Who interprets them? What type of ethics committee is needed to regulate the fairness of its invention? Who is now the higher – often more educated – class? And etc. The installation is both an archive of the work the automaton has written, an experience of an industrialization of a world where novelty is invented by the machines and the human is displaced to the role of the paper filler (and possibly the reader of philosophy in-between those moments of refill in my utopia). After exhibiting this autumn at the ICIA, [Self] Confidence is finding new exhibition formats and locations. Studio Alight is currently working with leads of showing this work in further audiences, for example at upcoming Vitalis this May, and even within a national courthouse in Helsingborg. Amazon Web Services. (2019). Amazon Polly – Text to Speech in 47 Voices and 24 Languages | Amazon Web Services. [online] Available at: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/polly-text-to-speech-in- 47-voices-and-24-languages/ [Accessed 5 Dec. 2019]. En.wikipedia.org. (2019). Automaton. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton [Accessed 5 Dec. 2019]. En.wikipedia.org. (2019). Prior Art. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art [Accessed 5 Dec. 2019].