AI plays a crucial role in the global cultural ecosystem. It recommends what we should see, listen to, read, and buy. It determines how many people will see our shared content. It helps us make aesthetic decisions when we create media. In professional cultural production, AI has already been adapted to produce movie trailers, music albums, fashion items, product and web designs, architecture, etc. In this short book, Lev Manovich offers a systematic framework to help us think about cultural uses of AI today and in the future. He challenges existing ideas and gives us new concepts for understanding media, ...

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 ...

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.

The Amme Talks is a conversation between poet and machine. In 2003, poet Ulf Stolterfoht and a chatbot named Amme (which means “wet nurse” in German) met in Berlin. For one week, Stolterfoht interrogated Amme: not just a chatbot, actually, but a steel-and-glass construction with a computer interface, which is connected to a glass of milk, a robotic arm that tips over the glass, and a tube that releases water, as if urinating. Stolterfoht asked Amme—the creation of artist Peter Dittmer—about the nature of authorship and the agency of language; he intended to turn the answers into an essay on poetics. ...

Amor Cringe explores the dually base and beautiful aspects of self-obsessed media culture. In a perennial bohemian style, an unnamed, ungendered protagonist travels from coast to coast and affair to affair, stumbling upon various moments of failure, absurd insight, and flashes of transcendence. Half traditionally-written and half AI-generated, Amor Cringe is a “deepfake autofiction” novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, created with the intention to be “as cringe as possible.” The result is a painfully self-aware series of encounters that exfoliate the repulsive and fascinating aesthetics of romantic life under social media.

The notion of artificial intelligence may seem distant and abstract, but AI is already pervasive in our daily lives. Anatomy of an AI System analyzes the vast networks that underpin the “birth, life, and death” of a single Amazon Echo smart speaker, painstakingly compiling and condensing this huge volume of information into a detailed high-resolution diagram. This data visualization provides insights into the massive quantity of resources involved in the production, distribution, and disposal of the speaker.

At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions of human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Nonetheless, they are inscribing and building those assumptions into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed. We offer up this exploded view map and essay as one way to begin seeing across a ...

Amidst a climate of uncertainty and social distancing due to COVID-19, writer and e-flux journal contributing editor Elvia Wilk and artist Anicka Yi discuss various changing global ecologies, viral and otherwise. Their original in-person conversation was planned on the occasion of Tate Modern’s selection of Yi for the annual Hyundai / Turbine Hall commission. A symbiotic organism in its own right, Anicka Yi’s work fuses multi-sensory experience with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form lush bio-fictional landscapes. Utilizing a “biopolitics of the senses,” Yi challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasizing olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her research ...

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 ...

Within mediated conditions, at some level everything becomes reduced to data. How do art practices collect data, circulate it, and themselves become data? How do artists and organizations reckon with the production and circulation of knowledge in increasingly online media environments? Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition examined how forms of digital storytelling, ethics, access, governance, and data sovereignty are being practiced in other disciplines. By looking at how media-makers across diverse fields are engaging with new technological tools and practices, The Mediatic Edition considered how these paradigms map onto artistic practice. In Back Up Your Data!, respondents to Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition reflect on new ...

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich painted his famous Red Square painting, more properly called Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions (1915). I think about how incendiary it must have been at the time, how arresting. How it prefigured the general collapse of figuration, of representation, into a single, glowing screen, an ultimate abstraction of life and death that is later taken up by PredPol, a predictive policing software company. How the Red Square is not even a square, but a slightly angled parallelogram. Particularly exciting is the way it, along with its sibling Black Square (1915), references Russian ...