AI, Artists, and the Future of Creativity

Vince Warne gives an Introduction to Vilém Flusser and his thoughts on AI art at the WIIH.

When: Wednesday, October 9, 330 pm
CHANGED ROOM: Where: Mary Lyon Hall, 211

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Vince Warne is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn. He is the Managing Editor of the Millennium Film Journal. His work concerns the history and future of film and the moving image.

“The technical images of our time are infected with texts; they visualize texts. It is about first programming the computation of particles, then deprogramming them to convert them into informative situations. It is about a gesture that takes place in a particle universe, with fingertips touching keys, and the structure of this gesture is as particulate of the structure of the universe, that is, it consists of clear and distinct mini-gestures.” Vilem Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 1985

“While traditional painted images have a cohesive physicality, technical images are ephemeral arrangements of particles: whether it’s the photons captured by the photosensitive chemicals or sensor of a camera, the pixels lighting up on a monitor, or the gaussian noise patterns that AI images emerge from, technical images are reorganizations of particulate data that can only ever achieve an illusory wholeness. They are always reducible to the particles that constitute them. …

More than any other medium, AI text-to-image synthesis lays bare the truth that all art is really curation. An artist absorbs influences from the world–from experiences, memories, other artworks–and synthesizes them into a new from via a medium. …

When we look at a photograph, we perceive a vision where the human hand is absent, because the mediums of technical images are black boxes, where programs happen invisibly. Rather than brush strokes applied over time, a photograph is created in an instant, so the human touch is felt retroactively in every choice made by the artist/operator leading up to the moment they press the shutter button–at which point the program inside the black box of the camera runs automatically.

AI images work in the same way–an operator makes choices in the construction of their prompt, and an image is produced automatically with a final keystroke. The technical mechanics are different than photography, but the process is structurally the same–the sum total of human decisions leading up to the moment that a program is run in a black box.” Vince Warne

Read some Vince Warne’s texts on AI: