DEM’ARTS Seminar Series (2nd Cycle) – Eighth Session

Joanna Zylinska

Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London.

Moderation: Azadeh Nilchiani, Postdoc, DEM'ARTS

« Creativity and Art Beyond the Human Exception »

>> Online session *(Séance en anglais)

Abstract
 

In a current cultural moment when claims are made for supposed computational creativity and agency, we are compelled to ask how the current operations of computing machines are reshaping our understanding of creativity itself. This talk probes what happens to both the idea of the human and actual situated human existence in all its experiences and contexts (including professional ones) when creativity is increasingly co-articulated by computation. Rather than stage a eulogy for human creativity or a celebration of machinic outputs, it offers a reimagining of art and authorship through the lens of critical posthumanist thought. It also asks what becomes of meaning, judgment and responsibility when imagination itself is partially automated. 
 

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Joanna Zylinska is an artist, writer, curator and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is an author of a number of books, including The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (MIT Press, 2023) and AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020). An advocate of ‘radical open access’, she is an editor of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series for Open Humanities Press. Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. Zylinska is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while examining various narratives of collapse, be it on the level of AI models or planetary systems. (Instagram: @joanna.zylinska)

Bibliography:

Zylinska, J. (2020) AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams. London: Open

Humanities Press. [open access]

Zylinska, J. (2023) The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [open access]

Zylinska, J. (2024) ‘Diffused Seeing: The Epistemological Challenge of Generative AI’, Media Theory, special issue on ‘Photographic Seeing’, Vol. 8 No 1: 229-258. [open access]


 

Access the session online Séminaire transversal de DEM’ARTS-Joanna Zylinska

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https://pantheonsorbonne.zoom.us/j/91607292679?pwd=H7gdknqbmbiXU5AkLyC0U7ZYIUkxWV.1 

Meeting ID: 916 0729 2679
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