Oh hello! Welcome to the arts of today, the air’s thick with the fumes of spray paint, a farts’ worth of pretension, and now, the influence of digital nightmares. Artificial Intelligence has crashed this party, (or shall I say, ‘soundscape listening party’), stirring up all sorts of drama among the crowd who thought Rick Owens and Anne Imhof were peak culture. So, let’s take a peak at this discussion with myself.
S/O to mega nerd Vishal Kumar for breaking down AI for us: basically, it’s as if your computer just got a human brain transplant and grew a body that suffers from the implications of gravity. Imagine you’re an oil painter, and your usual 4-dimensional-chess-game-of shadow tag has just leveled up to re-questioning the fabric of reality itself. Want to paint faces made of rubber lit by alien suns? Or maybe some out-of-this-world metal fabric draping through the cosmos? That’s just another Tuesday in the AI-assisted studio. Back in the day, to paint something like iridescent rubber skin, you’d have to either heist up a sci-fi movie prop department or, you know, google it (or bing, remember her?). But now, AI’s your magic lamp—no rubbing required.
This is the moment where Gandalf blocks the bridge, except it’s not a fiery demon he’s facing—it’s the modern art world’s wanna-be elite.
‘The concept of techno diversity can provide insights that cannot be reduced to capitalist extraction. Techno diversity recognizes that technologies are temporally and spatially produced by different knowledge systems, ideologies, political interests, economic forces and cultural practices. This liberating perspective can create space for collectives, peoples and identities to produce and control their own data – no data, small data, Indigenous data, more-than-human data, feminist data, queer data – and not be governed by Big Data and oppressive algorithms’
Sooooooo basically you’re saying:
Big tech companies and governments collect data from our daily lives, using it to generate profit and control societal and political dynamics. This process, often called digital capitalism or “data colonialism,” treats our lives as data to be exploited, exacerbating inequalities and creating new injustices. To counter this, the concept of techno diversity proposes recognizing the varied origins of technology and empowering diverse groups to manage their unique types of data, challenging the dominance of Big Data and restrictive algorithms. Embracing techno diversity and blending our identities with digital technologies and activism can help us protect our personal freedoms and develop a new form of influential and potentially rebellious data agency.
(Haha okay yes sure, but where is the thing, the revolutionary idea, the nugget of information so necessary to innovate, move forwards – that I don’t know? What the fuck do you think you can undo how a globalized world developed by keeping my queer data to myself?) I don’t just own a phone, I was raised with unmonitored internet access. I believe pedophiles have been keeping their data ‘anti-capitalist’ like forever but I bet you don’t have the same opinion when it comes to a few petabytes of kiddy-fiddling, do you now? Well look at that, grassroots, organically scraped child pornography.
Oh, techno diversity, you sweet, sweet, idealistic unicorn of a concept. It paints a pretty picture, doesn’t it? The underdogs, all banding together to manage their own data, mounting a brave resistance against the tech titans and their empire of bytes and line segments.Digital David vs. Goliath, but in this tale as old as time as Goliath has billions of dollars, cutting-edge tech, and enough political sway to make a senator sweat like a sinner in church.
These mega-corporations aren’t just big—they’re humongous, sprawling behemoths with the money and muscle to keep the scales forever tipped in their favour. Meanwhile, our plucky smaller groups, armed with nothing but good vibes, great intentions and natural deodorant – stepping into the ring with a slingshot but forgetting the stone. They might have the heart, but in the heavyweight division of global data politics, heart alone doesn’t get you the belt.
Techno-diversity sounds like the latest buzzword that could save us all, but it’s at risk of drying out into just that—a buzzword. Cool to say, empowering to think about, but more of a feel-good mantra than a silver bullet. In the battle against ‘Big Data’’, it might just end up as a pat on the back, granted by the institutions, before we all slide back into our roles in the data mines.
When you stack a panel on AI, arts, and tech with and simultaneously ‘against’ the big-league players, it starts to smell less like a creative concoction and more like a political rally in disguise. Like, why are we dragging ‘techno diversity’ into a (what could have been) straightforward chat about AI’s wonderful, low-threshold and (almost) no-budget possibility for artists? Also, can we have one art/tech talk that doesn’t spiral into a deep dive on feminism, queer rights, or ‘protecting the body in space’? (Antrophoceeeneee)Those are crucial, but it’s like a bad DJ constantly remixing a track when you just want to enjoy the original beat. Can we focus on unleashing AI’s artistic potential without turning it into a social justice rally every time? So, you wanna talk about AI, cybernetics, and the ‘metaverse’ but you are actually too lazy to explore and present me the potential resources AI has to offer? You fucking gooner.
You’re not into the game, you just like talking about it because you can indirectly resist to it, which fits into the narrative of the assumed oppressed and oppressor. And that’s what rebellion is, right? Right?
>CHAT IS THIS REAL???11!!/??
Here’s the kicker: the art world’s resistance to AI isn’t about preserving the “human touch”; it’s about avoiding real talk on creative decisions and dodging anything that might actually inject a dose of excitement back into art. While we pretend, we’re looking forward, integrating the future, we’re actually getting caught up in semantics. What does it mean? what did it mean?
‘’Key words: AFK, AI-Da, algorithmic catastrophe, algorithmic anxiety, biopolitics, Chat-GTP, Cloud Empire, Cosmo technology, cyborg, DALL-E, dark data, extractivist notions, fake news, ghosts in the machine, surveillance, techno diversity, glitches, prompting…’’
Alexa, how to critically think or apply oneself in a curator climate
As for the classic “AI is stealing our jobs” panic. Yep, folks in creative services are trembling in their sustainably sourced boots and Carhartt chorecoats. But maybe it’s time to stir things up? If your whole art career is about shitting out stuff a well-trained AI could replicate after a coding crash course, maybe it’s time for an upgrade of Kaliber. creativity isn’t just about nailing a naturalistic portrait or abstracting something, turning it into an object, and then projecting a narrative onto it; it’s about conjuring up something so out there, so uniquely bizarre, that it’s like bringing two completely unrelated things together in a hallucination. It’s about creating something new, not just recycling the same old patterns because they’re a hit on the ‘funded’ list.
AI in art isn’t about pushing artists out or some sort of debate on the authenticity of the creator or big data bad cuz I don’t know how qnap works and spent all my thought-bucks at the concept store; it’s about pushing them to new event horizons and quicker. (Is it going to end with that? For the people unwilling to apply themselves, be my guest, lots of fish in the sea and it does help if the pond stays relatively empty). Think of AI as a wild beast to be tamed, not some idol to worship or fear. Artists should be less obsessed with the semantics of AI and more focused on how it can pressure their work into new dimensions.
Bottom line? We’re on the edge of a new dawn, where creativity really is in the (A)I of the beholder. Artists aren’t heading for extinction; they’re just evolving. The ones who grab AI by the horns and use it to dickwhip their creative vision are the trailblazers of tomorrow. Time to ditch the cynicism, get our brains out of the vague bodies in space and dive into the idea of art being the only thing you have to keep actively studying.
By mixing AI and art is race play—controversial, maybe a little strange, but a consensual combo that’s opening up a whole new realm of possibilities. Let’s capitulate while it still is consensual because you know the ghost of Steve Jobs looms over me like a dark, expensive cloud (and goddamn do I love my ecosystem). Because in the vast abyss of the arts, fuck around and find out is all that matters.
By Maria van der Velde
Courtesy of The Unsafe House Amsterdam
Images by Maud Fernhout
Thanks to Ben Sampson and Ruth Spetter.
