AI and Algorithmic Aesthetics

AI and Algorithmic Aesthetics investigates contemporary relations between aesthetics and new digital technologies manifested through Artificial Intelligence models in fine-art making processes. It asks questions about human and non-human relations – specifically the affect these relations have on the way we create, view and consume fine-art and other aesthetic products. In doing so, it aims to develop a critical analytical framework for thinking about the ever-changing ways in which we produce fine-art through and with digital machines. It suggests ways of critically understanding creative processes which embrace mutation and interconnections between humans and machines as opposed to static understandings of this relationship as imposed by Western humanist ideology. Artificial Intelligence, or AI is a phrase used to describe a field of computer science that attempts to simulate human intelligence in machines. Generative Artificial Intelligence or genAI is used to describe a very specific type of AI, one that creates content (images, text, audio and video) based on previously learned material. Contributors draw on both AI and genAI within their chapters, exploring how these technologies are used as both a constructive metaphor for thinking about aesthetics and artmaking processes as well as a problematic for culture and society.

For example, both AI and GenAI technologies are positioned, by those that create them, as ‘open source’, yet they are highly regulated technologies: corporations, technological protocols and things like access to the internet decide and regulate them, and in extension the human and nonhuman subjects interacting with it and the aesthetic objects they co-create. So, while the process of creating fine-art with AI and genAI heavily relies on the artist themselves, its meanings and usage are also decided and enacted by the corporations that create it and its technical limitations. In being this way, the relationship between aesthetics and AI brings complex tensions to the fore: in restricting and enabling creation, thus providing valuable examples, which enable a deeper understanding of contemporary aesthetics, technological innovation, fine-art making processes and the relationship between the three.

Aesthetics and AI operate through rich material-discursive realms, engaging a multiplicity of actors, both human and otherwise, such as technology companies, technical protocols, academia, the government, museums and galleries and the fine-art market. The market for AI (and by default AI art) responds to normative, anthropocentric expectations of the ‘human’ -- specifically the attendant attributes of ‘intelligence’, ‘genius’ and ‘creativity’. Thus, it implies both an automation and externalization of a perceived inside and requires a more complex material-discursive understanding: AI and its attendant models is created by a very specific set of people (white, Euro-American men) who are driven by certain values and norms. These values and norms affect the bodies, both human and otherwise, which encounter AI and make art with it. In the context of this book, the relationship between AI and aesthetics then serves as an example of how the power that digital technologies like AI wield affect bodies. More specifically it offers a critical understanding of the way artistic experimentation with AI can challenge this power and the different modes of becoming that may emerge out of these challenges.