AI, automation and abstraction

In November 2022, the installation Unsupervised by the artist Refik Anadol was exhibited in the lobby of MoMA, New York. Aesthetically, it conveyed a dynamic display of abstract forms interpreting, via machine learning, MoMA’s archive of modern art. Conceptually, however, it sits at the nexus of a number of theoretical questions regarding the increasing use of artificial intelligence in art. Whereas the historical automatism of surrealism through abstract expressionism often purported to evoke the unconscious of the individual artist, the automatism of artworks such as Unsupervised claims to manifest the somehow non-human unconscious of modernity. Whereas the conceptual work of artists such as Sol LeWitt was algorithmic in an attempt to divest the art of the heroic creator figure, artworks such as Unsupervised seem to replace the latter with the heroic machine. Moreover, this romantic rhetoric and visual language obfuscates the immense amount of often emphatically exploitative labour required for such systems (Hito Steyerl) and also the fact that the ‘visual knowledge’ of computer software tends to serve existing power interests (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun). This panel seeks to accordingly historicise the emerging aesthetics of AI art making, and engage with questions such as how art historical methods might be employed to gain critical purchase on technological advances that threaten to only serve the status quo, and whether there is hope in current practice for the kind of subversive engagement with cutting-edge technological development that was often attributed to early new media artists such as Nam-June Paik and Gretchen Bender.