Generative AI on the Dissecting Table

Artists have historically been early adopters of visual technologies, but generative machine learning (GenAI) offers unprecedented challenges. The capacity of GenAI to fabricate images while disguising sources and operations (a feature of monopoly) destabilizes critical practices in the visual arts. Our roundtable discussion will dissect GenAI (alluding to Surrealism’s celebration of the operating table as a site of aesthetic machine encounters), touching on earlier moments of technological shock with once radical media such as printing, photography, and cinema. GenAI technologies summon hype about machinic agency, ironically coupled with oneiric states (“dreaming,” “unconscious,” “hallucination”). There is a propagative uncanniness to the algorithms’ results that are nonetheless often aesthetically disappointing, coming from technologies that can only sift, weight, and recombine pre-existing images. How are artists confronting near-daily upgrades in the energy-intensive software? Where are artistic innovations likely to come from (between crafted training sets, prompt engineering, and rewritten code)? Are there ways in which ancient utopian dreams of “letter-image magic” (whether Kabbalah, Zairja, Swift’s Engine, or Hesse’s glass bead game) are being mobilized, for a mediated universal imaginary yielding banal, average outcomes? We welcome submissions from artists tackling the scale and texture of GenAI to address its challenges to pedagogy, to labor, to IP and copyright, to considerations of “style” and authorship, as well as its known problems with bias, stereotype, “tokens,” colonialism, etc.. We aim to surface varying attitudes regarding these tools, and seek to include emerging artists as well as those already established.