Creative AI: A Conversation with Carla Gannis + Stephanie Dinkins

Pinch me.

It was tremendous being in conversation with artists Carla Gannis and Stephanie Dinkins during the Creative AI panel I moderated at the AI + the Lens and Screens Arts Symposium on March 18. I have so much respect for these two artists, whose work has inspired my writing, teaching, and thinking. I’m still ruminating on our discussion and the many areas their work addresses: creating with non-human intelligence, encouraging humans to be more human through technology, the value of small data, and so much more. A recording of our conversation can be viewed here.

GUEST CURATING: 404: ERROR

I’m very excited to be working with :iidrr gallery in NYC’s LES as a guest curator. Here’s the open call.

404: error

A 404 error is a standard HTTP message resulting when a server is unable to find a requested website. This familiar but undesired message indicates something in the system has gone wrong: there’s been a glitch. 

Glitches are understood as machine hardware or network malfunctions that lead to an incorrect or unexpected result or behavior. They can be inconvenient deviations from protocol, the standards that guide systems and set our expectations. But when these errors are exploited and intentionally used, they can work toward dispelling the myth of perfect transmission and reveal certain truths about a system’s design and the ideologies that shape it. Glitch as error or as chaotic system can be situated within a larger context of creative intervention, wherein an artist plays with digital action, information flows, and digital material toward new aesthetics and new ways of thinking. In this way, to glitch can be a powerful, demonstrative, and even political act, with the potential to “modulate or productively damage the norms of techno-culture”, according to Rosa Menkman. For Nathan Allen Jones, glitch can lead toward a kind of poetics: “Glitches work to subvert and short-circuit intentions into their opposites: hindrance, aimlessness, lostness, but they also push into new forms of use, purpose and knowledge by revealing the nature of knowledge and feeling in relationship to technics.” And, in Legacy Russell’s idea of glitch feminism, acts of glitch can encourage the “in-between as a core component of survival—neither masculine nor feminine, neither male nor female, but a spectrum across which we may be empowered to choose and define ourselves for ourselves.”

Choosing an error message as the exhibition title is an invitation to not only embrace such mishaps but also invite others to reflect on what’s possible when this kind of disruption is planned, thus thwarting normativity, and arriving at something else.

We are looking for such error-driven artistic approaches that encourage an aesthetic of chaos, uncertainty, and slippage, using glitch as a form of expression and exploration. We invite emerging artists who identify in some way as glitch makers and glitch thinkers who view glitch as a meaningfully disruptive force rather than a problem that needs fixing. We welcome works using any digital format—photography, video, illustration, animation, web, AR/VR/MR, installation, video games, fashion, etc.—that find inspiration in, or create conditions for malfunctions, bad actors, disruptions, systemic failures, noise, dissonance, and feedback loops, not only as works of glitch art but also as glitch acts.

SOURCES:

Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), Amsterdam: Colophon, 2011.

Nathan Allen Jones, Glitch Poetics, London: Open Humanities Press, 2022,

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, London: Verso, 2020.

about :iidrr

:iidrr is an artist-run platform that supports artists who are critically engaged in new technologies and cultures. We collaborate with artists who are active in the contemporary art world, such as Liu Xin, Wu Ziyang, and Snow Yunxue Fu. Our exhibition space gives the public year-round access to expansive, new media-focused art experiences, performances, and artist talks. Founded in New York City in 2020, :iidrr is now also based in Shanghai.

NEW WAYS OF SEEING OLD THINGS

I wrote about still life painter Fern T. Apfel’s incredible solo exhibition Abide With Me currently on view at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY.

In her work: “Everyday objects of the past are collected, sorted, and neatly arranged before they’re translated to paint on canvas. Old calendars, personal letters, recipes, pamphlets, stamped envelopes, ticket stubs, diary entries, program notes, school attendance records, school textbooks, playing cards, dice, spools of thread, miniature figurines, and other small, old things are arranged using the semiotics of collage as a compositional guide, then set against a richly hued backdrop. Deep reds, jewel-toned blues, greens, yellows, and other colors fill the empty space, creating visual contrast and emotional depth. In the series Worn, items of children’s clothing are featured. Some of this source material is on view across two large display cases for context, helping us see how these and other old, forgotten, discarded, and lost objects are recreated and resituated into Apfel’s new visual logics, gaining importance and beauty in their rediscovery and arrangement.”

The full article is live at Chronogram.com.

CURRENTLY READING: IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS

“One need only compare American, French, and German films to see how greatly nuances of shading and coloration can vary in motion pictures. In the photographic image itself, to say nothing of the acting and the script, there somehow emerge differences in national character. If this is true even when identical equipment, chemicals, and film are used, how much better our own photographic technology might have suited our complexion, our facial features, our climate, our land. And had we invented the phonograph and the radio, how much more faithfully they would reproduce the special character of our voices and our music… And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines. These machines are the inventions of Westerners, and are, as we might expect, well suited to the Western arts. But precisely on this account they put our own arts at a great disadvantage” (9).

Wrapping up the year with Glitch Poetics

After spending some time thinking about AI image synthesis, I felt invigorated by Nathan Allen Jones’ Glitch Poetics (2022), a book that helped me untangle the complicated relations between photographic heritage, affect, and the productive misuse of our technical tools.

There are many passages worth emphasizing, but this one brings many of the book’s most significant ideas together:

“Oscillation is a key idea for glitching because it describes a mode in which the temporalities of a medium outrun perceptive capacity and produce ambiguous, strange, ghostly and illusory effects. Like a thaumatrope illusion, where the persistence of human vision blends the images on two sides of a rapidly spinning piece of card into a single image, the glitch oscillation produces an effect in the receiver that is temporary and virtual, yet ‘real’ and absorbing” (253).

AI and the Future of the Lens and Screen Arts

My recorded conversation with the extraordinary artist, writer, and digital culture theorist Lev Manovich is now live. This talk is the first of a series of events about AI’s impact on image-making organized by the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media department at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. The next event is a one-day symposium on March 18, 2023.

Scrolling left to right: Charles Traub, dept. chair; me; Lev; Lev and I in conversation

A REVIEW OF THE MOVING PICTURE SHOW IN MFJ #76: WORLDS

I’m so pleased my review of The Moving Picture Show, curated by Peggy Ahwesh at Foreland in Catskill, NY earlier this year, was published in the fall issue of Millennium Film Journal. The issue was guest-edited by Barbara London and considers questions surrounding the meaning and makeup of worlds: geographies, ideas, mediums, and people. The Moving Picture Show, which broadly probes the relations between nature and technologies, fits nicely within this theme.

Currently Reading: Mothers, Fathers, and Others

It’s difficult for me to select just one passage from this brilliantly written collection of essays by Siri Hustvedt. Her prose is piercingly honest but is somehow delivered with a velvety quality. I can’t get enough of this book’s fluid intensity, especially in the last two heartbreaking essays. But I’m choosing an excerpt from an essay called “Living Thing”, which resonated with me and speaks to my ongoing interest in confrontations with vanishing points, liminality, and the relationship between presence and absence:

“Memory is another form of presence, more fragile than immediate perception, akin to dream and hallucination and prone to distortion” (187).

ORGANIC MATERIAL: EVENT HORIZON

I had the privilege of writing an accompanying essay for the artist collective Organic Material’s latest release Event Horizon: a collaborative, four-part, web-based, slowly but infinitely scrolling animated work based on an exquisite corpse exercise.

Images from left to right:  Mark Dorf: Refraction; Skye Nicolas: Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Skies are Blue; Amir H. Fallah: Last Prayer; Colette Robbins: Proscenium

Marc Swanson: A Memorial To Ice At The Dead Deer Disco

I wrote about Marc Swanson’s epic installation series, jointly exhibited at Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY and MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, for Chronogram.

JUST PUBLISHED: CURATING THE DIGITAL

This edited volume was several (turbulent) years in the making, but it’s finally here. The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Lu Ann De Cunzo and Catharine Dann Roeber, is now available for purchase. I contributed the chapter Curating the Digital, which considers the materiality, organization, and cultural significance of digital objects.

CURRENTLY READING: ALBERT & THE WHALE

“Dürer’s prints are revolutionary because of their speed. They swirl and roar. You want to turn the volume down. As Europe lived in fear of famine and plague and war, Dürer danced with death, employing emptiness to evoke things that were both there and not there: clouds and fire and water and air. It was the whiteness of the page which enthralled him. His white is light and heat, sparking saints and demons and civilians into sprawling, brawling life” (102).

ARCHITECTURE IS FROZEN MUSIC, A MONOGRAPH BY LAURE CATUGIER

I’m honored to be included in photo and video artist Laure Catugier’s first ever monograph. It’s an interactive ebook of her work alongside an introduction by Livia Tarsia in Curia, an interview with Élise Girardot, and an essay I wrote about Catugier’s work. The incredible folded book object, an architectural sculpture in its own way, is sold out, but the ebook is available here.

FILE EXCHANGE: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT 21ST CENTURY TOOLS + SENSIBILITIES

I had the pleasure of chatting with hosts and hybrid analog/digital sculptors Sophie Kahn and Colette Robbins on the newest episode of their YouTube series File Exchange. We talked about many things, including topics related to my research: fictional realism, language as a creative system, glitch politics, digital bodies and identities, and more. The episode is archived here, alongside previous episodes featuring digital artists who share their inspiring work, tools, and creative processes.

CURRENTLY READING: PROGRAMMED INEQUALITY

“Understanding this as a labor class, rather than through the lens of a few remarkable individuals, sheds light on the importance of gender as a formative category in technological organization and design. It forces us to rethink many of the assumptions of computer history narratives that hold up individuality and innovation as key explanatory elements. It also provokes a reconsideration of how histories of computing sometimes reflexively and unconsciously privilege those with the most power and implicitly endorse an ahistorical fiction of technological meritocracy. That the workers in this field were disproportionately white is no more a coincidence than the fact that they were overwhelmingly women. Throughout history, it has often not been the content of work but the identity of the worker performing it that determined its status, and these workers, while below their male peers, still occupied a position of privilege compared to other women….

… Histories like this offer examples that help us think about where increased dependence on computerization and digital labor forces may lead in the future. The construction of classes of ostensibly deskilled high-tech workers continues to enable the boom-and-bust cycle of technical advance and shape the social patterns that cohere around these systems” (16-17).

CuRrently reading: index cards

Moyra Davey quoting Marguerite Duras: “To be without a subject for a book, without any idea of a book, is to find yourself in front of a book. An immense void. An eventual book. In front of writing, live and naked, something terrible to surmount” (86).

Currently reading: the whole picture

“All art is political. Everything in a museum is political, because it is shaped by the politics of the world that made it. If you can’t see the views and the agendas coming through, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there: it might just mean that they are close enough to your own for you to take them for granted” (p. 16).

CURRENTLY READING: The CASE FOR RAGE

I’m starting the new year with a thoughtfully written philosophical examination of anger and how to channel anti-racist rage — Lordean rage — to effect change. Cherry writes,

‘In this book, I argue that a particular type of anger, what I call Lordean rage, has an important role to play in anti-racist struggle. Taking its name from Audre Lorde, the Black feminist poet and scholar who first articulated the version of rage I’ll be exploring, Lordean rage is targeted at racism. It tends toward metabolization and aims for change. It is informed by an inclusive and liberating perspective. An organizer who is angry at racial inequality and motivated to end it so that all of us, regardless of skin color, can flourish has Lordean rage. It is not an ideal type of anger. Rather, it is often experienced by the racially oppressed and their allies. Although Lordean rage may not be necessary, it can be uniquely used for anti-racist purposes’ (p. 5).

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

During these last two weeks of the year, I read two books about absence. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities summarizes the past two years I spent traveling the world only in my imagination and, more recently, fantasizing how to invent the impossible by way of my imagination. As I read, I noted what turned out to be one of the most frequently quoted passages in the text, so instead I’ll share a different one:

‘Phyllis is a space in which routes are drawn between points suspended in the void: the shortest way to reach that certain merchant’s tent, avoiding that certain creditor’s window. Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within, buried, erased’ (p. 91).

Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart was recommended to me by a friend. I don’t usually read memoirs, but I was drawn to the subject of grief and losing parts of one’s identity along with the loss of a loved one. I tore through this book but was snagged early on by the way Zauner described what it feels like to grieve:

‘Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors… There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again” (p. 6).

Transitioning out of one year and going into another feels a lot like stepping into an imaginary space. It’s a form of letting go as the calendar commits to the next numerical label in the sequence, and we all follow its lead without protest. In my imagination, there is protest. We will move forward but will continue to look back as our memories and imaginations intermingle, giving way to the impossible.

Here’s to a new year and to letting both holding on and letting go happen.

FLAT JOURNAL ESSAY: A ROBUST FLATNESS

I’m so honored to be included in Flat Journal’s Issue #2: Touch. My essay “A Robust Flatness” considers tactility and tangibility in digital space, from the flattened engagement of Zoom to the perceptual openness of VR.

Pictured above are an image from Matias Brunacci’s Virtualshamanism: Towards an alternative digital reality of consciousness (left) and Sophie Kahn’s Dematerialized virtual exhibition (right).