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DECENTRING ETHICS: AI ART AS METHOD

Edited by Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn and Emilie K Sunde
Published in 2025 by Open Humanities Press
ISBN (Print): 978-1-78542-155-6
ISBN (PDF): 978-1-78542-154-9
356 pages

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Outline:

Artists and cultural institutions are a vital force in the construction of a relational, collectively held ethics of human-machine assemblages. Technological change always out-paces ethical governance, producing an uncertain zone between what machines can do, and what is upheld as ethical by diverse publics. Working in ways that are often speculative and provocative, artists trace ethical tensions as they are emerging in public consciousness.

AI ethics developed by big tech has been critiqued for its performativity and lack of equity. Working in the gaps left unfilled by recent developments in national and international policy, this volume explores artists’ and curators’ radical visions for who or what requires ethical protection. This volume pushes past regulatory obligations and towards ethics as a way of being in the world.

The book advances a decentred approach to ethics. It draws on non-Western, ecocritical and feminist worldviews, and acknowledges the more-than-human as an agent with the capacity to act. We position AI art as 'method' – a process of working with, or in response to, the contemporary computational era. This expands the normative definition of AI art as art created with relative autonomy by computers. AI art as method frames ethics as situated, embodied and improvisational, whereby artists work with emergent ethical questions while challenging the more conservative frameworks of the cultural institutions they operate within. While AI art often utilises the materiality or software of machine learning, this is not a pre-requisite for AI art as method.

The book contains commissioned essays, in conversation pieces and artistic interventions, compiled by Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn and Emilie K Sunde. Contributions by Dani Admiss, Aarati Akkapeddi, Pita Arreola-Burns, Nora Al-Badri, Vanessa Bartlett, Elliott Burns, Gabby Bush, Sean Cubitt, Xanthe Dobbie, Solange Glasser, Beverley Hood, Libby Heaney, Ryan Kelly, Helen Knowles, Ben Loveridge, Margaret Osborne, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Iyad Rahwan, Kamya Ramachandran, Lucy Sparrow, Emilie K. Sunde, Tyne Daile Sumner, and Amanda Wasielewski.

Contents:

Acknowledgements

Foreword: Art, Ethics, and the Emergence of Machine Culture

Iyad Rahwan

Decentring Ethics: AI Art as Method

Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Emilie K. Sunde

A Handmade Dataset

Aarati Akkapeddi

Realism and Noise

Emilie K. Sunde

Poetic Simulation

Tyne Daile Sumner

AI, Art, and the General Imagination

Seán Cubitt

Non-Playable-Animals and Evolutionary Lifeforms: How artists programme and provoke ethical relations between humans and AI creatures

Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns

Exploring Trust and Care with Psychedelic, Plant and AI intelligences

Vanessa Bartlett in conversation with Helen Knowles

Re-cognition: A Decentred Ethics for AI in Art Museums

Jasmin Pfefferkorn

slimeQore (2022)

Libby Heaney

PIWO (Portalling-With-Others): Wayfinding for Curatorial Ethics in a Climate Emergency

Danielle-Maria Admiss

An Experimental Creative Practice Approach to AI Ethics in Art Museums: Following Exhibitions in the Making

Vanessa Bartlett

Collective Conversations Toward AI Art and Climate Change: Crafting FutureFantastic, Bangalore

Vanessa Bartlett in conversation with Kamya Ramachandran

Now You See Me... Institutional Conservatism and Censorship in Queer Remix Art

Xanthe Dobbie

Consent, Connection, and Creativity: Navigating the Ethical Boundaries of Using Biometric Data in Artistic Performance

Solange Glasser, Ben Loveridge, Margaret Osborne, Lucy Sparrow, and Ryan Kelly

Computational Intimacies, from Prompting to Prose

Jasmin Pfefferkorn in conversation with Beverley Hood

The Role of Artists in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Amanda Wasielewski

The Emancipatory Potential of AI Art

Jasmin Pfefferkorn in conversation with Nora Al-Badri

Decentred Ethics: a collective statement

Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Emilie K. Sunde, Tyne Daile Sumner, Gabby Bush

Biographies

The volume extends the work of AAIDE (Vanessa Bartlett, Gabby Bush, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Tyne Sumner and Emilie K Sunde), based at The Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, University of Melbourne (2021-2024). Produced with additional support from the Institute of Art & Technology, Liverpool John Moores University, and Digital x Data Research Centre, London South Bank University.