Kate Steenhauer

This film encompasses moving imagery, music and spoken word from actors animating Ada Lovelace, Annabella Byron, Ada's tutor and family acquaintances, and Charles Babbage.

Changing Ideas Award
"The Landscape of Intelligence" is a multi-media artwork that honours the imagination and legacy of Ada Lovelace.
The work addresses the persistent issue of gender inequality in science and technology while opening critical dialogue around the ethics and biases embedded in contemporary artificial intelligence. By foregrounding Lovelace, whose foundational contributions to computing have often been overlooked, it brings visibility to one of the unsung heroines of science and reflects broader patterns of exclusion in the construction of scientific knowledge.
Bridging historical and contemporary perspectives, "The Landscape of Intelligence" highlights how Lovelace’s ideas laid crucial groundwork for modern computing. Her visionary insight that machines could extend beyond mechanical calculation into realms of creativity, imagination, and symbolic reasoning, resonates strongly with present-day AI systems.
The visual language incorporates layered, tree-like structures inspired by neural networks (AI systems loosely modelled on the human brain) that learn to categorise input data that then is used to make decisions. As these networks expand, they become increasingly specialised, revealing both the potential and the limitations of AI algorithms.
The musical composition is structured as a theme and variations for vibraphone and electronics, based on a twelve-chord progression generated by Chimère, a creative AI designed for collaborative, cross-cultural practice. Developed to address bias in technology, Chimère responds to Lovelace’s early speculation on machine-made music, transforming her ideas into a contemporary generative form.
AI technologies are trained on datasets that often reproduce existing inequalities, raising urgent questions around representation, authorship, and fairness. By positioning AI as both collaborator and subject of critique, the work invites audiences to reflect on how these systems mirror and reinforce societal structures.
Both celebratory and interrogative, "The Landscape of Intelligence" advocates for greater visibility of women in STEM and positions artistic practice as a tool for dialogue, equity, and more inclusive technological futures.