Save the Date on Nov 5, 2024
class for Emergent Digital Media at AdBK Munich presents:
*If AI was the answer what was the question, again?*
/Conference on Tue, Nov 5, 09–18 at AdBK Munich, Akademiestraße 2, Main
Building, Central Lecture Hall, free admission/
With: Elisa Giardina Papa, Orit Halpern, Francis Hunger, Vladan Joler,
Kevin B. Lee, RYBN, Felix Stalder, Hito Steyerl
The political economy of AI impacts on both its generative output as
well as on art scenes and creative labor. Which strategies and
tactics can artists employ in a sphere of corporate generative
media to avoid redundancy and their own obsolescence?
The conference tackles these questions through multiple
perspectives: Theft and extraction of data from users to train large
generative AI models. The replacement of human labor, or the
simulation of machine labor through human labor. The environmental
impact of heavy computation.
How do these become visible within generative output? How do they
modify the conditions of artistic labor and what are strategies of
resistance against corporate extraction? How can art and art
education react in the face of the serious challenges to arts‘
aesthetic and material environment?
*Schedule*
09.00 Talk: Felix Stalder – Unreal Creations. Generative AI as premonition
10.00 Elisa Giardina Papa – Surrogate Data and Ungovernable Data
11.00 Vladan Joler – Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and
Power Since 1500
12.00 Break
13.00 RYBN – Human Computers, a laborious mediarcheological study
14.00 Kevin B. Lee – The Generative Afterlife of an Extremist Archive
15.00 Orit Halpern – Speculative Nets: Artificial Intelligence, Finance,
and Reactionary Politics
16.00 AUDIO, PLATFORMS, LABOR, intervention
17.00 Response by Hito Steyerl and Francis Hunger
*Abstracts*
Felix Stalder – Unreal Creations. Generative AI as premonition
It is often said that generative AI is conservative, even reactionary,
that it can only recreate versions of the past, contained in its
training data. That data, it is also regularly pointed out that,
contains mainly historical biases which generative AI reproduced and
amplifies. Both of these claims are correct, and trigger calls to make
AI more fair, accountable and transparent. In my talk, I want to shift
away from such questions of representation, and focus on the generative
dimension. Generative AI produces “unreal data” that is, presentation of
things that do not exist, but might come into existence based on that
data. They are premonitions of worlds to come. Thus, the question we
need to ask, is perhaps less if the images (videos, texts, and sounds)
are correct or fair, but whether the worlds they envision are desirable.
Elisa Giardina Papa – Surrogate Data and Ungovernable Data
In this talk, Elisa Giardina Papa will outline the theoretical and archiva
research which informs two of her video installations, Technology of
Care and Cleaning Emotional Data. Presenting images she collected while
working as a “data cleaner” for various AI systems, she will address the
ways in which machines are disciplined and trained to see. Tracing,
bounding-boxing, and labeling are key operations used to teach machines
to separate Data from data, signal from noise, and orderly things from
disorderly ones. They are also, Giardina Papa argues, the
onto-epistemological operations of modern imperial and colonial
conquest. Ultimately, this talk will be an invitation to reflect on
modes of seeing otherwise which remain radically unruly, irreducible,
and incomputable.
Vladan Joler – Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power
Since 1500
Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization and physical
installation exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved
over five centuries. It traces technological patterns of colonialism,
militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these
forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. In this guided
tour, Vladan Joler will deep dive into some of the shifts in
communication technologies, infrastructures, and computational
architectures, and how they are entwined with the histories of social
control and classification.
RYBN – Human Computers, a laborious mediarcheological study
“Human Computer” (RYBN.ORG, 2015–2022) is a mediarcheological
investigation that argues that computation is rooted in Adam Smith’s
Division of labor, as exemplified by the manufacture of calculus
established in 1793 by Gaspard Riche de Prony (D. Roegel, D. A. Grier).
The research revisits several seminal attempts to simulate intelligence:
From the infamous Mechanical Turk (W. von Kempelen, 1770) to the
contemporary human-in-the-loop computing paradigm, passing by Eliza (J.
Weizenbaum, 1964) and the Turing test (A. Turing, 1950).
It uses the perspectives of digital labor studies, as well as Philip K.
Dick’s notion of simulacra. To reevaluate them by following this
composite genealogy, we state that what is called today ‘Artificial
Intelligence’ inscribes itself in the long tradition of the apparatus of
labor metrics, surveillance and optimization (A. Rabinbach). In the age
of Artificial Artificial intelligence, Pseudo-AI and Faux-AI, the
question we ask is: what trick made us loose sight of these laborious
origins so to ingenuously believe that “Artificial Intelligence” was
about intelligence?
Kevin B. Lee – The Generative Afterlife of an Extremist Archive
Generative AI algorithms can function as an inadvertent archive of
illicit images such as extremist propaganda and violent content. Certain
search terms can be used to access this archive, however transformed by
algorithms that enforce safety on the one hand and reinforce aesthetic
idealizations on the other. This presentation shares research related to
an upcoming film that explores how the current state of online media
shapes the memory, ethics, and rewriting of violent histories.
Orit Halpern – Speculative Nets: Artificial Intelligence, Finance, and
Reactionary Politics
The talk will examine the relationship between psychology, neo-liberal
economic thought, and technology since the 1970’s. I will discuss how
ideas of democracy, freedom, agency, and decision making were
reconfigured in terms of self-organizing systems, communication, and
non-consciousness. I argue this change continues to inform contemporary
politics, and shape how we understand institutions, ‘the human’ and
technology.
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