On False Augmented Agency and What Surveillance Capitalism and User-Centered Design Have to Do With It

In the last years, there has been a surge in AI-powered products. Often marketed as "free", these services operate as hooks to lure unsuspecting users into voluntarily giving up data about every aspect of their life. Their data is the primary fuel of surveillance capitalism, a new economic system that exclusively benefits so-called Big Tech organisations at the expense of personal privacy and freedom of choice. This paper argues the ways these AI-powered products are being imagined and designed is further generalising a kind of, "enframing" that encourages a bureaucratic relationship with the world disguised as (a false sense of) augmented agency. This paper shows that technologically informed philosophical reflections can contribute to getting ourselves back into the feedback loop of technological mediation by helping us recognise our "becoming" with technologies as a design process.

Forging Strategic Alliances

Under conditions of so-called “Platform Capitalism”, software and algorithms undertake the important task of designing the interaction amongst online users and establishing criteria of relevance for content. As such, they operate as curatorial agents of platforms’ content, establishing what is there to see, know and consume. This state of affairs calls for a revision of the traditional role of the (human) curator who is confronted with an online environment characterised by the unprecedented collision of commercial, aesthetic, cultural and political interests. The question of what kind of relationship the curator shall create with the algorithm then becomes crucial: is this a relationship of antagonism, resistance or alliance? How do these two curatorial agents influence each other? In this article, I analyse a cluster of hybrid artistic and curatorial experiments (including my own curatorial work) that foregrounds online platforms as discrete modes of socio-technical assemblages that curate particular forms of connectivity amongst networks of users, data layers and technical infrastructures. By doing so, I argue for the forging of strategic alliances between human and machinic curators as a strategy to channel new forms of creativity and cooperation under conditions of “Platform Capitalism” and to operationalise human-algorithmic curation as a political and aesthetic practice within the networked culture.

The Zombification of Art History

In the past few years deep-learning AI neural networks have achieved major milestones in artistic image analysis and generation, producing what some refer to as ‘art.’ We reflect critically on some of the artistic shortcomings of a few projects that occupied the spotlight in recent years. We introduce the term ‘Zombie Art’ to describe the generation of new images of dead masters, as well as ‘The AI Reproducibility Test.’ We designate the problems inherent in AI and in its application to art history. In conclusion, we propose new directions for both AI-generated art and art history, in the light of these new powerful AI technologies of artistic image analysis and generation.

CITAR Journal - xCoAx Special Issue 2019 Editorial

xCoAx Special Issue Editorial 2019.

Wandering Machines

The development of automatic narrative systems has been largely driven by the engineering tendency to anthropomorphize the machine logic so they can ‘tell stories’ similar to how humans do. From the artists’ perspective, however, the experimentation with their media is often more important than the (plausibility of) storytelling, and it often unfolds in non-verbal events that have a potential to generate diverse narratives through experience of the audience. We discuss the emergence of the creative practices that enrich the poetic repertoire of new media art by playfully utilizing the machine flaws, irregularities, errors and systemic technical imperfections thus revealing the human biases and fallacies entangled with technology. One of the implications of these practices is that if the AI research opens up a broader space in which a machine could achieve its own authorial voice, our concept and understanding of the narrative would need to be reconsidered.

Computational Visualization for Critical Thinking

This paper looks back at historical precedents for how computational systems and ideas have been visualized as a means of access to and engagement with a broader audience, and to develop a new more tangible language to address abstraction. These precedents share a subversive ground in using a visual language to provoke new ways of engaging with about complex ideas. Two new approaches to visualizing algorithmic systems are proposed for the emerging context of algorithmic ethics in society, looking at prototypical algorithms in computer vision and machine learning systems, to think through the meaning created by algorithmic structure and process. The aim is to use visual design to provoke new kinds of thinking and criticality that can offer opportunities to address algorithms in their increasingly more politicized role today. These new approaches are developed from an arts research perspective to support critical thinking and arts knowledge through creative coding and interactive design.

Intersectional AI Is Essential

Artificial intelligence is quietly shaping social structures and private lives. Although it promises parity and efficiency, its computational processes mirror biases of existing power even as often-proprietary data practices and cultural perceptions of computational magic obscure those influences. However, intersectionality—which foregrounds an analysis of institutional power and incorporates queer, feminist, and critical race theories—can help to rethink artificial intelligence. An intersectional framework can be used to analyze the biases and problems built into existing artificial intelligence, as well as to uncover alternative ethics from its counter-histories. This paper calls for the application of intersectional strategies to artificial intelligence at every level, from data to design to implementation, from technologist to user. Drawing on intersectional theories, the research argues these strategies are polyvocal, multimodal, and experimental—suggesting that community-focused and artistic practices can help imagine AI’s intersectional possibilities and help begin to address its biases.

Uncertainties in the Algorithmic Image, xCoAx Special Issue 2019

The incorporation of algorithmic procedures into the automation of image production has been gradual, but has reached critical mass over the past century, especially with the advent of photography, the introduction of digital computers and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Due to the increasingly significant influence algorithmic processes have on visual media, there has been an expansion of the possibilities as to how images may behave, and a consequent struggle to define them. This algorithmic turnhighlights inner tensions within existing notions of the image, namely raising questions regarding the autonomy of machines, author- and viewer- ship, and the veracity of representations. In this sense, algorithmic images hover uncertainly between human and machine as producers and interpreters of visual information, between representational and non-representational, and between visible surface and the processes behind it. This paper gives an introduction to fundamental internal discrepancies which arise within algorithmically produced images, examined through a selection of relevant artistic examples. Focusing on the theme of uncertainty, this investigation considers how algorithmic images contain aspects which conflict with the certitude of computation, and how this contributes to a difficulty in defining images.

Queer Representation Incorporated at “Him”, Character of “The Powerpuff Girls”

In audiovisual's history, minorities as LGBTQ+ people had been excluded or stereotyped, thus, this study has as a guiding question understanding “Him”, character of the classic cartoon series “The Powerpuff Girls”, produced between 1998 and 2005 by Cartoon Network - by the bias of the Queer Theory, which address the questions about non-heteronormative bodies that belong to marginalized groups whose rights are denied and their lives taken. For this, a documentary and exploratory methodology was used, based on the authors researches like: Guacira Louro, Judith Butler, Edgar Morin, besides the analysis of two episodes: Octil Evil and Bash Birthday. Thus, the problematizations arised here refer to: a) How the Queer is related to Him and its possible problems and b) The dialectic between the bodies discourses accepted and excluded from the heteronormative society. The argumentation of this research is sustained by homophobia and transphobia brazilian datas, which reveals the urge to approach matters about gender and sexuality representations.

"I make films to be seen": the narrative issue of Flora Gomes

The feature films by Flora Gomes: Mortu nega (1988), Udju azul di Yonta (1992), Po di sangui (1996), Nha fala (2002) and Republica di mininus (2012) narrate stories that speak of transits, music, woman, children, war, (neo)colonialism, cosmogony, life, death, love, birth, migration, of tradition, modernity, collectivity; using as scenario, the countryside, outdoors, with ironic, critical and metaphorical speeches. In this sense, the present abstract "I make films to be seen": an analysis of the film narrative of Flora Gomes" proposes emphasizing the elements of narrative cinematography of the fiction films of Flora Gomes present in the discourse, in themes, in the soundtrack, in orality, in time, in duration, in space, in camera movements, in the preparation of actors, in the work of illumination of the black body, in the scenery, not the visual metaphors of this director.