Techart Conference

Anna Munster 

■ Abstract

Despite the fantastical alignments conjured by the explosion of viral AI-slop – shrimp Jesuses, giant cats behaving as humans and gilded Presidents – there is something literal that permeates the surface and texture of their visuality. This literalism both confirms and dismisses the artifice of their generation. AI-slop literalism is served up both via the operations of their models and in the desire – particularly manifest in the circulation of such images in recent global politics – to foreclose any distance between image as representation and image as world. AI-slop functions via immediacy, hitting our nervous systems and triggering outrage, fear, sympathy all the while provoking incredulity and distrust.

This talk asks: what kind of approach might we take to AI image production –both conceptually and aesthetically – in the context of this slop deluge? Tactical strategies that focus on the black boxing of AI models' operations and intervening in these do not address the slippery sensory and affective impingements through which AI-slop ingresses.  Instead, I turn to a different idea of operativity artists offer us in the current atmosphere of slopification. This idea of operativity comes to us via my take on Gilbert Simondon, who advocated for the knowing of technical systems and systems of thought “allagmatically".  An allagmatic approach does not redescribe, represent or literalise. Instead, it encounters the operations of a system by running parallel to them, taking note of the potential for operations and events to always diverge from the system’s structure. In the practices of artists such as Anna Ridler and Caroline Sinders or Sophia Crespo, this involves analogical retracing of AI operations coupled with a redeployment of algorithmic and statistical architectures towards less literal and more speculative outcomes. Such artistic practices revisit distance and divergence between image and world and in so doing make room for subtle modes of sensing and feeling images.  

■ Bio

Anna Munster has been at UNSW Art and Design since 2001 on a full-time tenured basis. She is an active researcher with two sole published books: An Aesthesia of Networks (MIT Press, 2013), and  Materializing New Media  (Dartmouth College Press 2006). She also edited Immediation I and II ( OHP Press 2019). Her current research interests are: statistical visuality and radical empiricism, the politics and aesthetics of machine learning, more-than-human perception, new pragmatist approaches to media and art, new media art environments and ecologies; time, movement and sonicity.

Anna regularly collaborates artistically with Michele Barker. Barker and Munster have been working in multi-channel audiovisual environments exploring the relations between perception, movement and media.Their most recent work was the solo show, all the time in the world, 2019 for Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney. In 2017, they were commissioned for a multichannel audiovisual environment, pull, for Experimenta Media Arts: Make Sense, 2017–2020. They have been awarded New Work Grants, in 2012 and 2010 from the Australia Council for the Arts to realise their work. Other  projects include: évasion, opens in a new window (2014), HokusPokus (2011). Duchenne’s smile (2-channel DV installation, 2009), Struck (3-channel DV installation, 2007).