Keynote:
Joanna Zylinska,
Goldsmiths, University of London
On creative computers,
art robots and AI dreams
This talk will address the problem of creative collaborations by focusing on the relationship between artificial intelligence, design and invention. It will engage with the oft-posed question: ‘Can computers be creative?’, while also demonstrating why this may not be the best question to ask about computation, robotics and AI. Along the way, many alternative questions will be formulated, in an attempt to challenge the binary framing of the current thinking on computation and automation. Yet questioning will not be the only thing on offer. The paper’s argument will also involve a critique, but this should not be treated as a technophobic rejection of AI technology. Instead of pitching the human against the machine, we will approach different forms of human activity, including art, as having always been technical, and thus also, to some extent, artificially intelligent. The critique on offer will be primarily concerned with the political underpinnings of the current AI debate, and its accompanying rhetoric and aesthetics. To close off, we will turn to the exploration of the problem of machine vision in AI research, which will lead us to interrogate different ways of seeing, (in)visibility and perception, across various platforms and scales.
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Joanna Zylinska is a writer, lecturer, artist and curator, as well as Professor of New Media and Communications and Co-Head of the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of seven books – including The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018, open access version available), Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017) and Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2014, open access version available) – she is also a translator of Stanislaw Lem’s philosophical treatise, Summa Technologiae (Minnesota UP, 2013). In 2013 she was Artistic Director of Transitio_MX05 ‘Biomediations’, the biggest Latin American new media festival, which took place in Mexico City. Her own art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of photomedia.
