With: Gregory Chatonsky, Simon Denny, Navine G. Dossos, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Mat Dryhurst, Constant Dullaart, Holly Herndon, Antonio Somaini
There is a strange disconnect in tech’s recent effects on politics and culture.
"While culture and art feel constrained by data populism, scandal management and market opportunism, politics is on a rampage. Nothing seems impossible, from invading or selling Greenland or Gaza, abolishing central banks or food banks, to making Nazis great again.
AI plays a role in accelerating the advent of autocratic rule. It assists in making people and social systems redundant and superfluous; it AI-washes austerity with a “scientific” sheen, it creates tornados and wildfires by burning up natural resources in data centers, it generates Aryans with six superhuman fingers to advertise for German hard right party AfD.
AI industries provide tools for populists and autocrats to proceed like old school genius artists who defy taboos, laws and regulation to perform creative destruction. Their near monopoly industries have vast leverage over workers, markets and users alike and radicalize the chasm between rich and poor. AI tools are brushes, magic wands and chainsaws in the hands of libertarian strongmen.
In light of this cooptation – or shall we say couptation? – we ask, how artists can recapture any creative initiative, or some form of artistic freedom?
How do they/we escape mid-art, the midbrow mediocrity that comes with pimped and averaged mass data tweaked by partisan AI models? How to deal with the competition by full-on futurist performance art now operationalized by tech oligarchs, bureaucrats and incel imperialists?
What kind of tools – if any – are necessary to open up different possibilities for recent technology? Avoid, transform or oppose? Stall, stake or speed up? How to do art when its traditional forms have been culturally appropriated by multipolar dilettantes?"
*The conference will be held in English. Free admission.