Rethinking affordance

n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory

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What does it really mean to author, to own, or to replicate art? The data- hungry mash-up engines of AI are eroding the value precepts of scarcity and individual expression at the heart of copyright law. Is this the occasion to reconsider the limits of private property systems, if not the very make-up of creativity

'Quit stalling…!': Destiny and destination on L.A.'s inner city roads

If driving has today really become a Western “metaphor for being” (Hutchinson), then common roadside signs proclaiming “Right lane must exit” or “Through traffic merge left”, inventions such as the automatic transmission, and the agreeable straightness of freeways can all be understood as symptoms of an ongoing socio-political struggle between the driver as democratic agent, and the state as institu-tionalized regulatory force. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the context of urban traffic, where private motorized transportation represents both the supreme (if illusory) expression of personal freedom, and official efforts to channel individualism by obliterating its sense of direction and ideological divergence. On the concrete proving grounds of the clogged inner-city freeway, “nomad science” and “state science” (Deleuze & Guattari) thus oscillate between the pseudo-liberatory expressivity of mainstream car culture and the self-effacing dromoscopic “amnesia of driving” (Baudrillard). Are a city’s multitudes of cars resistant “projectiles” (Virilio) or, rather, hegemonic “sites of containment” (Jane Jacobs)? This essay approaches the complex tensions between “untamable” democratic mobility and state-regulated transit by way of two Hollywood-produced films that focus on traffic in Los Angeles: in Collateral (2004), a cab driver comes to recognize and transcend the hopelessly directionless circularity dictated by his job; in Falling Down (1993), a frustrated civil service employee abandons his car on a rush-hour freeway and decides to walk home, forced to traverse the supposedly unwalkable city without the “masking screen of the windshield” (Virilio). As they “quit stalling”, both protagonists become dangerous variants of the defiant nomad – one a driver who remains on the road but goes “under the radar”, the other a transient pedestrian whose movement becomes viral and unpredictable. My analysis of the films’ metropolitan setting and of the incessant movement that marks both narratives links political and philosophical economies of motion, speed, and transit to a discussion of the various bandes vagabondage (Deleuze & Guattari) that are formed between city and driver, driver and car, and car and pedestrian. In this discussion, the inner-city road emerges as a primary site of conflict between civic rule and individual subject, and the flow of urban traffic comes to represent the tensions generated in spaces where movement is understood as both liberating and as a form of control. - See more at: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/article.asp?DOI=10.3384/cu.2000.1525.09122367#sthash.OWb9TlsB.dpu

The politics of visual indeterminacy in abstract AI art

In Perception Engines and Synthetic Abstractions, two generative AI art projects begun in 2018, Tom White experiments with visual abstraction to explore the indeterminacy of perception, interpretation, and agency. White’s AI systems produce images that will be interpreted as abstract artworks by human viewers, but which also confront human audiences with the realization that what is here deliberately rendered indeterminable for them will remain near-perfectly legible for AI-powered image recognition systems. This difference in perceptual and interpretive agency foregrounds an underlying politics of visual indeterminacy. White’s projects thus increase awareness of how machine vision—for example in automated online filtering systems—can diminish the horizon of what human audiences can or cannot see in an AI-driven digital cultural landscape, and how, in the process, underlying biases are normalized and human viewers become habituated to the dramatic shrinking of perceivable/viewable online image content mediated by AI

Generative adversarial copy machines

This essay explores the redistribution of expressive agency across human artists and non-human entities that inevitably occurs when artificial intelligence (AI) becomes involved in creative processes. In doing so, my focus is not on a ‘becoming-creative’ of AI in an anthropocentric sense of the term. Rather, my central argument is as follows: if AI systems are (or will be) capable of generating outputs that can satisfy requirements by which creativity is currently being evaluated, validated, and valorised, then AI inevitably disturbs prevailing aesthetic and ontological assumptions concerning anthropocentrically framed ideals of the artist figure, the work of art, and the idea of creativity as such. I will elaborate this argument by way of a close reading of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) technology and its uses in AI art, alongside examples of ownership claims and disputes involving GAN-style AI art. Overall, the discussion links to cultural theories of AI, relevant legal theory, and posthumanist thought. It is across these contexts that I will reframe GAN systems, even when their ‘artistic’ outputs can be interpreted with reference to the concept of the singular author figure, as ‘Generative Adversarial Copy Machines.’ Ultimately, I want to propose that the disturbances effected by AI in artistic practices can pose a critical challenge to the integrity of cultural ownership models – specifically: intellectual property (IP) enclosures – which rely on an anthropocentric conceptualisation of authorship

AI art as a hyperobject-like portal to global warming

This paper situates artificial intelligence as a vehicle that can allow human agents to engage with complex issues such as global warming. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s conceptualisation of global warming as a ‘hyperobject’ which, by its very nature, resist knowability on a human scale, I consider the extent to which AI, when it is itself approached as hyperobject-like, can become a useful medium for engaging critically with the issue of global warming. The argument, then, is not that AI can make global warming human-knowable, but that through AI, human agents can access the quasi-unknowability of global warming. I begin by surveying Morton’s theory of the hyperobject and its valence in critical discourse on contemporary/digital art, and then explore the positioning of AI as hyperobject-like. This discussion is bookended by analysis of a representative artwork, Tega Brain et al’s Asunder (2019), which, as I argue, addresses global warming issues by incorporating AI as a hyperobject-like technology

Copies without originals

What does it really mean to author, to own, or to replicate art? The data- hungry mash-up engines of AI are eroding the value precepts of scarcity and individual expression at the heart of copyright law. Is this the occasion to reconsider the limits of private property systems, if not the very make-up of creativity