Event overview
A lecture by Professor Anna Munster on deepaesthetics and AI
Organised by Media Arts, Royal Holloway and Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths.
Image: Midjourney image generated in response to a text prompt generated by a customised GPT-bot: ‘Visualize AI-powered visual services that provide real-time insights into customer behaviour for a warehouse and storage facility in West Bengal…’ The image forms part of the ChatFOS project, 2023 ongoing (Zoe Horn, Liam Magee, and Anna Munster).
Probing statistical computation’s operativity as it pervasively infiltrates all aspects of life, immediately encounters the vectorial contours of AI’s ‘deep’ aesthetics. ‘Deep aesthetics’ names just that conjunction of ‘innovation and quantified experience’ (Future Technologies Conference 2024), that steers the urgent genericism of automated cultural production, now running off the back of deep neural network architectures. Could a ‘deepaesthetics’, however, also be deployed to configure an odd, even infelicitous, sensibility for machine learning?
In my long-running project, DeepAesthetics, domains, sites, and phenomena of machine learning are probed – from the statistical operationalization of race to the predictive confidence of inaccurate deep classifiers making category mistakes. In this talk, I take slices from this project and ask: what kind of artful techniques are required for a different AI ‘deep aesthetics’ to register? I propose an artful retracing of machine learning operations can loosen claims to prediction and determination for computational models made operative by machine learning. This ‘retracing’ is conceived as an allagmatics, borrowing from Gilbert Simondon’s ‘theory of operations.’ Analogically enacting its operations with a twist, an allagmatic arts of machine learning engenders a difference between tracing and actualising, leaving open a margin of indeterminacy for what else AI might become . In the work of Del Complex, Tega Brain and others, a sensibility that simulates and differences AI emerges and another deep aesthetics latently assembles.
Biography
Anna Munster is a writer, artist and professor at the University of New South Wales, Australia, where she co-directs its newly formed Autonomous Media Lab. Her research currently focuses on process-based theorisations of computational experience with an emphasis on more-than-human sensing and artful interventions into AI. Her new book 'Deepaesthetics: on computational experience in a time of machine learning', will be published by Duke University Press, 2025. She is a practicing artist, who collaborates with Michele Barker, working across sound, video, data, and autonomous systems.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 May 2024 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
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