Techart Conference

Joanna Zylinska 

■ Abstract

Immersive AI installations have, in recent years, transformed exhibition spaces into environments that are to be experienced with the whole bodily sensorium, beyond just the eye. Works by Refik Anadol, Anna Ridler and Mat Collishaw surround visitors with flowing constellations of data: pixel-fields that resemble blooming flowers, vegetal growth or underwater ecologies. Rather than positioning the viewer at a distance, these works draw bodies into rhythms of movement, colour and light. This talk begins from that encounter, foregrounding sensation as a key term for understanding how AI art operates across different registers of perception, affect and embodiment.

Critics have sometimes dismissed such data installations as empty spectacle, describing them as banal, decorative, even anaesthetic. Yet this response risks overlooking how these environments actively choreograph relations between human and machine. My talk will argue that they stage a contemporary form of “data animism”, in which AI appears not merely as a tool but as a quasi-living system that generates sensations of vitality. The question is not only what these works represent, but how they make us feel – and how they allow us to sense the world.

To situate this shift, the talk revisits early film theory, where figures such as Henri Bergson, Jean Epstein and Gilles Deleuze understood cinema as a medium capable of animating the world through movement and affect. If cinema once activated such animist sensibilities, what happens when these are reconfigured through generative AI? Has the locus of collective, life-enhancing sensation shifted from film to computational systems? Tracing connections between early naturalist cinema and contemporary “flower–pixel–vector” aesthetics, the talk places these works within longer histories of mediating nature’s transformations. At the same time, it confronts the material conditions of AI: extractive infrastructures, environmental costs and the uneven distribution of technological benefits. Against this backdrop, the promise that AI might “make us feel alive” becomes both seductive and troubling. Who is included in this “us”? What forms of life are amplified – and which are diminished or excluded? The presentation will showcase with my own recent artwork, co-created with AI.

■ Bio

Joanna Zylinska is an artist, writer, curator, and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is also a member of Creative AI Lab, a collaboration between King's and Serpentine Galleries. Zylinska is an author of a number of books, including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020,open access) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). An advocate of ‘radical open-access’, she is an editor of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series for Open Humanities Press. Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. In 2013 she was Artistic Director of Transitio_MX05 ‘Biomediations’, the biggest Latin American new media festival, which took place in Mexico City. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to figure out what art ‘after AI’ will look like. Her latest book, The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI, came out from the MIT Press in November 2023 (open access).