Session Chair: Yumeng Guo
Presentation 1
A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND PROMPTS: TOPIC MODELING OF AI ART SUBREDDIT COMMUNITIES
Jing Han, Andrew Iliadis
Temple University, United States of America
Text-to-image generation (AI art) has become a mainstream phenomenon since the introduction of DALL-E by OpenAI in January 2021 (Nast, 2023). ). On the one hand, AI art challenges definitions of creativity that center on anthropocentric values and discredits the contributions of artists in the training of these AI models (Knibbs, 2023). On the other hand, it blurs the line between artists and non-artists by enabling new ways of creating art (e.g., prompt engineering: an iterative and experimental text-based process to interact with text-to-image generation models). Regardless of one’s ethical stance, practitioners of AI art, including artists of various skills and non-artists, form and participate in online communities to showcase their wares, share practices and resources, and learn from each other.
This study uses a topic modeling approach to examine topics within three subreddit communities centered on three text-to-image generation models (r/StableDiffusion, r/midjourney, and r/weirddalle). The analysis, based on the top 500 posts from each subreddit over one month, reveals distinct community foci: r/StableDiffusion emphasizes technological innovations and technical learning, r/midjourney showcases AI art and prompt learning, while r/weirddalle is more competitive, focusing on creative or entertaining results. The study further derives topics from prompts extracted from the images, revealing preferences for popular media characters, high photorealism, and surrealist styles, with a notable emphasis on portraits of women.
Presentation 2
Digital Dancing: The Ontology and Ownership of Dance Online
Hetty Blades, Vipavinee Artpradid
Coventry University, United Kingdom
This paper draws on literature in dance studies and analytic philosophical aesthetics to show how ontology and ownership are entwined in the context of dance online. I describe how the legal and social mechanisms through which the ownership of dance is managed are dependent upon (often implicit) assertions about dance’s ontology. I go on to explore the concept of the dance ‘work’ (see Pakes 2020) and propose that alternative ways of conceptualising dances might better reflect online practices for the making, sharing and ownership of dance. This research is funded by [anonymised] through the project [anonymised].
Presentation 3
Under the Feet of Shadows: an arts-based speculative inquiry into Ireland’s data industries
EL Putnam
Maynooth University, Ireland
Ireland has become a predominant site for data centres in Europe. While data industries present their own speculative fictions for economic and technological development that are posed to shape the Irish landscape and write its future, this paper poses the question: what other speculative fictions exist for data industries in Ireland? Under the feet of shadows is a multimedia art project created by the author in collaboration with Irish novelist Mike McCormack that merges science fiction with folklore, real with imagined mythologies, and histories of technology in Ireland, involving critical and reflexive engagement with technics, proposing new means of imagining technological progress and development within the Irish rural context. The conceptual framework for the project focuses on how humans, technologies, and the landscape are inherently relational and co-constitutive, bringing together Gilbert Simondon’s and Yuk Hui’s philosophies of technology with media materialism and aesthetics that highlight material agency and entanglements of affective embodiment. Using arts-based research methods as speculative inquiry, the artwork tells a fictional origin myth of a yet-to-be built data centre in Killala, Ireland. Within Under the feet of shadows, there are attempts to identify an Irish cosmotechnics that is awkward, ambivalent, and wrought with frictions. This shift in emphasis to material engagements with the local rural landscape reframes entanglements of economics, politics, and technology in a manner that is rooted to the ground.
Presentation 4
Tapping the "untapped resource": How twentieth-century industrial priorities have shaped contemporary new media art practices
Roopa Vasudevan
University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States of America
Contemporary artists using emerging technologies in their work are often positioned as innovators, mavericks, and diagnosticians, who work “outside” of the tech industry and thus bring sorely needed perspective to its developments. However, viewing new media artists as fully independent actors, devoid of any connection to industrial and corporate aims, serves to eclipse the long-standing and substantial ties that the field has to the protocols and priorities of the mainstream technology industry. These, in fact, have existed for as long as artists have attempted to integrate computation, electronics, networking, or other high-tech components into their work—both when these tools are owned and operated by corporations, but also in more diffuse, ideological ways.
This contribution, which draws from my larger dissertation work, traces the evolution of the cultural imaginary surrounding new media artists, defined in my research as practitioners who expand, reinvent, or misuse technological expression. By explicitly placing archives from three twentieth century “art and technology” initiatives against interviews with new media artists and cultural workers I conducted in the present day, I emphasize the foundational connections that new media artists have to industrial practices—and argue that this relationship can be traced back to the first attempts to place artists into collaborations with industry. As a result, industrial mandates have, to a large degree, shaped the popular conception of the new media art field, guiding both the practicalities of working with digital systems as well as notions of what artists “should” be doing with their work.
