Looking forward to being a CAA Co-Chair for SAC roundtable The Politics of AI as a Medium of Art with Lorelei d'Andriole, Michigan State University and Julian Haladyn, OCAD
“Machines have the morality of their inventors.” -Amiri Baraka
How is our current age of technological reproducibility unique from the crisis of the modern era? Ninety years ago, Walter Benjamin wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” introducing political art theory on how technology developed under capitalism shifted the value of art. This roundtable seeks to bring together scholars and artists to discuss the conceptual implications of AI as a medium of art as well as common contradictions of the medium today. For example, the use of computers by new media artists in the United States to produce their work is explicitly intertwined with the violent exploitation of the global south and thus, using such a medium to make work about equality may be complicated to say the least. This panel will not be focused on what AI as a medium of art may do in the future, but is instead focused on what it is doing now and what relevant historic contexts led us to our current crisis within politics and art. Regardless of how artists might use AI in their work we must hold the dialectic that whatever accessibility features or delight it offers, that machines have the morality of their inventors. In this round table, the ideology of the corporate inventors of these tools will be considered as a prerequisite to any individuals artistic expression.