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DECENTRING ETHICS: AI ART AS METHOD
Edited by Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn and Emilie K Sunde
Upcoming volume in the series, to be published in 2024 by Open Humanities Press
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. It includes contributions by: Dani Admiss; Aarati Akkapeddi; Nora Al-Badri; Vanessa Bartlett; Gabby Bush; Sean Cubitt; Xanthe Dobbie; Solange Glasser, Ben Loveridge, Margaret Osborne, Lucy Sparrow, and Ryan Kelly; Libby Heaney; Helen Knowles; Jeannie Marie Paterson; Jasmin Pfefferkorn; Off Site Project; Iyad Rahwan; Kamya Ramachandran; Tyne Daile Sumner, Emilie K. Sunde; Amanda Wasielewski and others (tbc).
The volume extends the work of AAIDE, which has been based at The Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, University of Melbourne 2021-2024. AAIDE are Vanessa Bartlett, Gabby Bush, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Tyne Sumner and Emilie K Sunde.
