In digitized, interconnected, post- and trans-human times, judgment becomes ‘justment.’ Once online, criticism diffuses into the channels of the social networks, it is commented on, ironized, parodied, corrected. Individual criticism has turned into dividual criticism. A response to Engaged Art Criticism — 7 Propositions by Ines Kleesattel and Pablo Müller.

In his letter to Ada Augusta Lovelace of July 2, 1843, Charles Babbage writes: “I like much the improved form of the Bernoulli Note but can judge of it better when I have the Diagram and Notation.” He is referring to the last in a set of notes written by Lovelace that interpreted the Analytical Engine, the first fully automatic and universal computer, invented by Babbage in 1834, although never actually completed during his lifetime. She appended these notes to her translation of an article written by Luigi Federico Menabrea after he had heard Babbage present a paper on the ...

Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: ...

For most people publishing creative work online, there is a growing sense of anxiety. While we have more online tools than ever to help operationalize and monetize creative businesses, the available options often feel mismatched with how we naturally create. We want work to be financially valued without compromising our integrity. We want to make meaningful work that we’re proud of, not please an algorithm. We want to share work in ways that feel right to us, not compete for attention on a feed. We want to feel seen without our creativity and identities being exploited. The broad industry of sharing ...

Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup—including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the ...

Over the past decade, a growing number of artists and critical practitioners have become engaged with algorithms. This artistic engagement has resulted in algorithmic theatre, bot art, and algorithmic media and performance art of various kinds that thematise the dissemination and deployment of algorithms in everyday life. Especially striking is the high volume of artistic engagements with facial recognition algorithms, trading algorithms and search engine algorithms over the past few years. The fact that these three types of algorithms have garnered more responses than other types of algorithms suggests that they form a popular subject of artistic critique. This critique addresses ...

What does thinking mean in the age of Artificial Intelligence? How is big-scale computation transforming the way our brains function? This collection discusses these pressing questions by looking beyond instrumental rationality. Exploring recent developments as well as examples from the history of cybernetics, the book uncovers the positive role played by errors and traumas in the construction of our contemporary technological minds. With texts by Benjamin Bratton, Orit Halpern, Adrian Lahoud, Jon Lindblom, Catherine Malabou, Reza Negarestani, Luciana Parisi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Michael Wheeler, Charles Wolfe, and Ben Woodard.

Ancestors and Algorithms appears online in issue 2 of Fictional Journal and is reproduced in the Propaganda pdf document. In 2000, Dan Greaney, the writer of The Simpson’s cartoon, imagined Donald Trump as the president of the United States in the episode Bart to the Future, and he admits that the idea “was pitched because it was consistent with a vision of America going insane.” The show creates an unimaginable scene, the embodiment of its viewer’s worst nightmare and hilarious fantasy that has since become reality. A global dissatisfaction with liberal democracy has cleared the political stage for right-wing populists such as Trump and ...

The idea of being online is in danger of extinction from redundancy. The Internet has become the principal site of construction, defense, storage and dissemination of new knowledge and social identity alike. Facebook’s population will soon eclipse that of China, and its holdouts nonetheless have well-formed electric selves in the servers of the NSA. As our physical world is increasingly tapped, scanned, streamed, imaged and mapped in realtime, the province of offline is a shrinking territory. In each wave of digitization—the archival, the social, the physical—the evidence of its arrival and its path to maturity are the same: search. For David Joselit, ...

In this episode Vivian and Noah purchase David Young’s piece titled Winter Woods, a work produced using a GAN, leading to a larger discussion around art created using AI. Artist, researcher, and podcaster Mat Dryhurst helps explain how AI works, as well as how DALLE-2 , a new AI system from OpenAI is different from other GANs. We also hear from artist Super Metal Bosch, one of the artists behind the GAN art project Super Metal Mons. Vivian goes on to compare AI to photography and the art of being a clown, which goes over Noah’s head. Artist Carlos Sanchez ...

Since their previous episode about AI (episode 2), the conversation around AI has exploded and gone viral. Dall-e mini memes proliferated everywhere utilizing Dall-E mini now known as Craiyon, a text prompt AI image generator. An artist utilizing AI won first place in an art context, and the New York Times wrote about it. With that has also come skepticism, criticism, and fear regarding AI. William Wiebe is an artist and researcher whose work deals with machine perception, and created a project called SMPLverse which utilizes a synthetic data set created by Microsoft to train face tracking algorithms to translate facial ...

New technological media such as film, photography and computers have altered the way we perceive possible relations between stillness and motion in the visual arts. Traditionally, cinema theory saw cinema and especially the ‘illusion of motion’ as part of the ideological swindle of the basic cinematic apparatus. This collection of essays by acclaimed international scholars including Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser, Mark B.N. Hansen, George Baker, Ina Blom and Christa Blümlinger, starts out from a different premise to analyse stillness and motion as part of a larger ecology of images and media. They argue that the strategic uses of stillness and ...