With support from the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), the Center for 21st Century Studies and the Center for the Humanities at UW-Madison are collaborating on a research initiative and series of public programming that focuses on the relationship between AI and artistic practice, exploring how AI-generated aesthetics reshape creative production, authorship, and interpretation. By engaging scholars, artists, and technologists, we examine the ethical and aesthetic implications of computational creativity, raising fundamental questions about artistic agency, originality, and the boundaries between human and machine-generated cultural production.
Project Overview
Artificial intelligence, and machine learning more generally, is faster than us humans. While we continuously feed it large quantities of data accumulated over long periods of time, AI sorts, filters, recombines, and refeeds it back to us 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 oversight is unfortunate because aesthetic considerations are not ancillary but central to the chronopolitical implications of AI. Caught in timestamps of data that are discrete and fragmented, AIs are seemingly devoid of a past, present, and future continuum that is embedded in embodied memory and experience. In contrast with the iterative performativity that maintains AI’s feedback loop of input and output as well as its optimized predictions based on large domains of data, these lived perspectives afford the histories of human experience of and in time.
Events
All events are co-hosted by C21 and UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities as part of a collaborative research initiative on Aesthetics, Art, and AI with support from the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI).