Artistic Panel
Deep Cultured helped organise the artistic panel at the GenAI and Creative Practice conference in Amsterdam. The panel offered during the a valuable opportunity to examine the continued prominence of individual artistic “mastery” in the context of GenAI—an idea raised by Baptiste Caramiaux in the keynote of the main conference.
Femke Herregraven allowed the audience to understand how generative AI could be mobilized in her reflections surrounding death and rebirth: from the capture of the sighs of Korean divers springing back to life to give voice to a personified embodiment of the breathing world, to a stochastically growing or burning forest biome “living” on her computer.
Vera Van Den Burg presented a collection of ceramic pieces, each, co-generated and recursively increasing: she proposed the process of firing the clay, at the slow and uncertain whims of the kiln shared by (rather disapproving) other ceramicists, as an alternative analogue for algorithmic generative creation, slower and self-appropriated.
Lastly, Gabriele de Seta explored the ways that AI anomalies, such as the sputters of purposefully hindered text-to-speech models could both challenge the authoritative and opaques facades of corporate products, by revealing the limits and shortcuts of their training process, and open up analogies to other cultural narratives and practices – such as the possession-inducing recordings of certain indigenous tribes.
An interesting throughline between these creations: while thematizing themes one could expect to reflect a negative experience of machine learning models (friction, frustration, failure, lacuna), each proves that the process of curation and oblique repurposing allows artists to impose their own pace and critical outlook, and eludes the expected “model collapse” of bland, uncritical homogeneity.
(Expressed gratitude for the organizers and participants: Sabine Niederer, Isa Verhoeven, Christine Erb, Eftychia Stamkou, and Marieke de Goede).
