In this moment of environmental, political and pandemic accelerated crisis, art has become increasingly entangled with the cultural logic of analytics platforms, Silicon Valley imaginaries and planetary scale computing. And yet, in the art museum, ‘the digital’ has largely been understood as a tool, rather than a cultural form with specific socio-technical affordances and politics.

Under these conditions, various AI imaginaries💭 have begun to prosper across the art museum’s operations. For the exhibitions team, AI is to be celebrated as a tool of a new artistic avant-garde 🖼; for senior managers, AI is to be championed as a talisman of the institution’s contemporary relevance 👏; for communications teams, AI promises predictive insights into audience behaviours, maximising ‘engagement’🤳; for development teams, AI offers a gateway to lucrative relationships with the tech sector🤝; for museum eductators, AI is a troubling object that demands new pedagogies and literacies 🤔.

How might artists and cultural workers resist AI’s veneer of novelty and avoid being instrumentalised as an onboarding tool for Big Tech ?

🗄️ Event Archive 🗄️

👉Opening Keynote: Hito Steyerl 🏴 Subprime Images. Tuesday 31st October. 🚩 🚩 Recording & Resources 🚩 🚩

👉 Panel Discussion: Crisis in the Archive: on the future commons after AI . Tuesday 7th November. Chaired by Nicolas Malevé  (Aarhus University) with Paul Keller (Open Future Foundation) and Maui Hudson(University of Waikato/Local Contexts) 🚩 🚩 Recording & Resources 🚩 🚩

👉 Panel Discussion: On the Limits of Curatorial Knowledge and the Digital with Victoria Walsh (Royal College of Art), Bassam El Baroni (Aalto University), Kay Watson (Serpentine Galleries) and Seb Chan (Australian Centre for Moving Image). Tuesday 14th November  🚩 🚩 Recording & Resources 🚩 🚩

👉 Panel Discussion: Data, Models, Bodies, Publics 🦉 with Machine Listening, Caroline Sinders and Vladan Joler  and Simone C Niquille on Tuesday 21st November 🍄  🚩 🚩 Recording & Resources 🚩 🚩

👉 Closing Keynote: James Bridle 👽 Thursday 30th November 🐒 🚩 🚩Recording & Resources 🚩 🚩

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Critical AI in the Art Museum is brought to you by the Computational Culture Lab, in the School of Art and Design at The Australian National University with financial support from the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. Organised by Katrina Sluis and Erica Molesworth👋, contact us at admin [at] criticalai [dot] art  

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