The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) has been selected to participate in a research initiative on “Human Craft in the Age of Digital Technologies” organized and funded through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. In the 2025-26 academic year, C21 will collaborate with the Center for the Humanities, UW-Madison on an interdisciplinary research project that offers public lectures, workshops, and symposia on “Aesthetics, Art, and AI.”
This joint series will explore how contemporary art practices situate the human experience of time into a longer and more complex history of AI. The initiative is divided into two phases: Phase I focuses on how aesthetic practices can help understand the impact of data empires on history and memory, while Phase II examines the implications of generative AI on artistic creativity, authorship, and aesthetic values.
Artificial intelligence, and machine learning more generally, is faster than humans. While it is continuously fed large quantities of data accumulated over long periods of time, AI sorts, filters, recombines, and refeeds it back in a performative and hyper-present loop. But how does AI conceptualize time and history – or does it at all? And how do human practices of artmaking visualize and embody the durational contexts that AI bypasses in its functional efficiency? While these questions have started to receive critical attention from disciplines such as law and philosophy, the technical and policy nature of these engagements make little room for matters of authorship, creativity, art, and aesthetics. This research initiative aims to address this oversight.
Learn more: https://chcinetwork.org/initiatives/human-craft
AI Research at C21:
At C21, one of the main Collaboratory Research Projects, “AI and the Humanities,” considers some of the most pressing questions for higher education: what is the future of humanities in the context of AI? The goal is to approach AI not from an educational technology or informational technology standpoint, but rather from a critical and ethical one. In other words, we seek to marshal the fundamental shared elements of the humanities and social sciences – critical thinking, ethics, language, and context – to bring a deeper and more reasoned consideration to this moment of upheaval in both higher education and culture at large. C21 plans to support the AI and the Humanities Collaboratory in the next year, integrating this ongoing research project into our public programming.
Learn more: https://uwm.edu/c21/research/collaboratories/ai-and-the-humanities/