September 23, 2021. 16:00 (Riga, LV time)
Keynote Speech
Online
Art and AI – Automating the Sensorium
Christiane PAUL
Over the past years artificial intelligence has moved to the center of technology discussions due to the rapidly increasing role of ‘machine learning’ in data processing and decision making for the purposes of commerce, labor, surveillance, and entertainment, among other areas. Digital art has critically investigated the developments of AI and the social and cultural transformations generated by it, including the effects of the automation of our senses. The talk gives an overview of artworks that have explored vision as it is reflected in image recognition; speech and voice in relation to issues of sentience and personality; as well as the construction of knowledge. Exposing bias and contextual misunderstandings or drawing attention to underrepresented data sets, these artworks explore how AI learns to see and classifies images or tells stories. The talk also considers the automated sensorium’s aesthetics and potential for creative expression.
Christiane Paul is Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, as well as Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation’s 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and her books are A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, May 2016); Digital Art (Thames and Hudson, 2003, 2008, 2015); Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts(Intellect, 2011; Chinese edition, 2012); and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 – 2018 (2018/19), Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011) and Profiling (2007), and is responsible for artport, the museum’s portal to Internet art. Other curatorial work includes The Question of Intelligence (Kellen Gallery, The New School, NYC, 2020). Little Sister (is watching you, too) (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NYC, 2015); and What Lies Beneath (Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, 2015).