Thank you. And yes, when your area suddenly becomes Current Events, lots of people suddenly "discover" the terrain you've long been stewarding :)

Necropolitical slop factory

Would love to read them!

And hybrid exploration - using systems to both test their limits and learn our own in prompting, for instance - is a recursive back and forth, a dialogue one can have *with* a system. It's why the story of this process is so important! It moves people in its drama; it is moving.

Well said! One challenge I find in moving between curation and criticism is that I completely understand and appreciate the artist's process - just as you describe. Any image or work can produce new thoughts and emotions that we can't quantify or predict. That's always worthy in and of itself

I think AI art can be art just in eliciting emotion, sensation, or thought in a viewer, but intentional or exploratory creation of AI art is a form of play that I also have enjoyed, if nothing else for better understanding the extent or limitations of my own ability to concept subjects in abstract

Thanks, Chris!

Great thread from Norah…

Meaning: it has to convince you of its thesis.

Thank you! I rarely post but when I do, it's an argument about *something*

Great thread on AI art, method, and proof of work

And I say that having spent much of my career looking at, writing about, and swimming in the world of generative art, computational art, and AI art ;) The works that last show process, develop narrative, create an artist mythology, defend their claims, and take a position. It's a rhetorical artform.

If our visual field is flooded with synthetic slop, the 'why' for using AI has to be clear. Finding elisions in a canonical archive: could be cool. Oneiric dream process of siphoning compelling images from latent space, usually cool. If it's to convince me of its necessity, I'm rarely convinced

Why do I need an AI visualization of an archive? What does it teach me about patterns across art movements that is useful for understanding individual works, movements they came from, or curation, that I couldn't know without it? Why is it useful? Why is it aesthetically or conceptually persuading?

How do the visualizations build on custom ML processing of a museum’s collection tell us something NEW about that collection? What do we learn about Agnes Martin or Fluxus scores through this new visualization, that we could not learn from looking at the artworks themselves?

Anyone having issues with posting here? Posts can't seem to be deleted ... threads are all wonky ... this is why I don't do social media anymore :)

I think a critics' tone has to sit between Saltz maniacal contempt and Anadol's maniacal zeal. It's both/and. If an archive rendered into ML visualizations invite a flat, passive viewing, isn't that a mirror of our algorithmic condition that works to average our visual field?

There are few truly exceptional works and practices produced through human-AI collaboration that can even survive without the artist's story of their painstaking choices through training and the presence of their intent at every step. This is the stage these works are at: proof of work

When AI artists launch into long treatise about the intimate process of their collaboration with 'just a tool', the explanation always has a 'lady doth protest too much' tone. In this moment of slop, the process narrative has to be paired with the output ...

*What could go wrong #agentic #malware

!! Wow, thank you Bruce Sterling - I will

*Hey, if you prompt some of that "seriously engaged on its own terms" stuff, send it to us in Turin.

medium.com/@bruces/shar...

While I completely understand the AI backlash and hopes for burst bubbles, I fear the great work computational artists and critical AI artists, using systems thoughtfully ... the work they've done to introduce major concepts first to art audiences and beyond for years, is being lost

-- That we do enjoy attributing livelikeness to inanimate beings, like sprites or gnomes in our little menagerie. That we do so despite knowing what is intellectually true. What strategies do these writers suggest past what was articulated 50 years ago, to help discern what's what in the flood?

How many excerpts of a writer's conversation with Claude set up to prove the same point a million times can we read? It doesn't matter that it doesn't feel or lacks a soul, at all, not at scale; it's more imperative to assess the ways we can't differentiate between the synthetic and real --

No matter how many Gotcha! - "AI can never create art, a novel, a poem," "AI can never be Joyce or Henry James or make me cry or ___" pieces the New Yorker or Boston Review, etc. publish, I've not seen one seriously engage with what creative AI does and can do, that's new, considering its own terms

Torres del Paine (Patagonia, Chile 🇨🇱)

I just want to thank BlueSky for keeping me honest. For a moment there I was almost struck by the beauty and majesty of our planet, the feats we're capable of when we turn our energies to science and collaboration. But then I was reminded that actually there's bad stuff so being happy is cringe. Ty.

AI's aesthetics of failure On the demise of Sora and our enduring revulsion to AI slop

OpenAI's Sora and Meta's metaverse were shuttered the same week. Both were defined by an aesthetic that embodies Silicon Valley's current project: to undermine labor, replace art + lived experience with digital facsimiles, and extract value at any cost. And users recoiled at the mere sight of them.