When the Vermont Complex Systems Center at the University of Vermont hosted The Conference on Artificial Life: What Can Alife offer AI?it included a call for artists. The Art in Artificial is an interview series with some of these artists, conducted by Jenn Karson and students from the UVM Art + AI Research group.
We were featured on ProteusTV‘s Twitch channel on April 22, 2022. In this 40-minute program, the artists share their work and engage in a conversation about artworks informed by artificial life and artificial intelligence. The short pre-recorded videos with individual artists are linked above (see artist name).
Art + Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the University of Vermont
The UVM Art + Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Group is engaged in an ethnographic study of artificial intelligence; we interrogate its tools. We consider machine learning a domain of artistic and artificial production and our studio work occupies its social and computational space.
Concerned with the histories and futures of human-machine relationships, our research seeks to unearth aesthetic, social, material, ethical and cultural constitutions deep within machine learning’s black box. Tracing crescents that flow from creation to collapse and rooted in evolutions of rational and irrational computations, the artworks we produce are corporeal artifacts extracted from a dense lattice of super-computer flesh.
This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award No. OAC-1659377. Computations were performed on the Vermont Advanced Computing Core supported in part by National Science Foundation (NSF) award No. OAC-1827314.
Protecting human beings from the domination of machines and technocrats is a laudable enterprise, but if the machines are full of human beings who find their salvation there, such a protection is merely absurd (Ellul, 1967)