<nettime> Conference in Munich, Nov 5: If AI was the answer what was the question, again?

[Francis Hunger via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Save the Date on Nov 5, 2024


class for Emergent Digital Media at AdBK Munich presents:

*If AI was the answer what was the question, again?*

/Conference on Tue, Nov 5, 09–18 at AdBK Munich, Akademiestraße 2, Main 
Building, Central Lecture Hall, free admission/

With: Elisa Giardina Papa, Orit Halpern, Francis Hunger, Vladan Joler, 
Kevin B. Lee, RYBN, Felix Stalder, Hito Steyerl

   The political economy of AI impacts on both its generative output as
   well as on art scenes and creative labor. Which strategies and
   tactics can artists employ in a  sphere of corporate generative
   media to avoid redundancy and their own obsolescence?
   The conference tackles these questions through multiple
   perspectives: Theft and extraction of data from users to train large
   generative AI models. The replacement of human labor, or the
   simulation of machine labor through human labor. The environmental
   impact of heavy computation.
   How do these become visible within generative output? How do they
   modify the conditions of artistic labor and what are strategies of
   resistance against corporate extraction? How can art and art
   education react in the face of the serious challenges to arts‘
   aesthetic and material environment?


*Schedule*

09.00 Talk: Felix Stalder – Unreal Creations. Generative AI as premonition

10.00 Elisa Giardina Papa – Surrogate Data and Ungovernable Data

11.00 Vladan Joler – Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and 
Power Since 1500

12.00 Break

13.00 RYBN – Human Computers, a laborious mediarcheological study

14.00 Kevin B. Lee – The Generative Afterlife of an Extremist Archive

15.00 Orit Halpern – Speculative Nets: Artificial Intelligence, Finance, 
and Reactionary Politics

16.00 AUDIO, PLATFORMS, LABOR, intervention

17.00 Response by Hito Steyerl and Francis Hunger


*Abstracts*

Felix Stalder – Unreal Creations. Generative AI as premonition

It is often said that generative AI is conservative, even reactionary, 
that it can only recreate versions of the past, contained in its 
training data. That data, it is also regularly pointed out that, 
contains mainly historical biases which generative AI reproduced and 
amplifies. Both of these claims are correct, and trigger calls to make 
AI more fair, accountable and transparent. In my talk, I want to shift 
away from such questions of representation, and focus on the generative 
dimension. Generative AI produces “unreal data” that is, presentation of 
things that do not exist, but might come into existence based on that 
data. They are premonitions of worlds to come. Thus, the question we 
need to ask, is perhaps less if the images (videos, texts, and sounds) 
are correct or fair, but whether the worlds they envision are desirable.


Elisa Giardina Papa – Surrogate Data and Ungovernable Data

In this talk, Elisa Giardina Papa will outline the theoretical and archiva
research which informs two of her video installations, Technology of 
Care and Cleaning Emotional Data. Presenting images she collected while 
working as a “data cleaner” for various AI systems, she will address the 
ways in which machines are disciplined and trained to see. Tracing, 
bounding-boxing, and labeling are key operations used to teach machines 
to separate Data from data, signal from noise, and orderly things from 
disorderly ones. They are also, Giardina Papa argues, the 
onto-epistemological operations of modern imperial and colonial 
conquest. Ultimately, this talk will be an invitation to reflect on 
modes of seeing otherwise which remain radically unruly, irreducible,
and incomputable.


Vladan Joler – Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power 
Since 1500

Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization and physical 
installation exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved 
over five centuries. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, 
militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these 
forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. In this guided 
tour, Vladan Joler will deep dive into some of the shifts in 
communication technologies, infrastructures, and computational 
architectures, and how they are entwined with the histories of social 
control and classification.


RYBN – Human Computers, a laborious mediarcheological study

“Human Computer” (RYBN.ORG, 2015–2022) is a mediarcheological 
investigation that argues that computation is rooted in Adam Smith’s 
Division of labor, as exemplified by the manufacture of calculus 
established in 1793 by Gaspard Riche de Prony (D. Roegel, D. A. Grier). 
The research revisits several seminal attempts to simulate intelligence: 
From the infamous Mechanical Turk (W. von Kempelen, 1770) to the 
contemporary human-in-the-loop computing paradigm, passing by Eliza (J. 
Weizenbaum, 1964) and the Turing test (A. Turing, 1950).
It uses the perspectives of digital labor studies, as well as Philip K. 
Dick’s notion of simulacra. To reevaluate them by following this 
composite genealogy, we state that what is called today ‘Artificial 
Intelligence’ inscribes itself in the long tradition of the apparatus of 
labor metrics, surveillance and optimization (A. Rabinbach). In the age 
of Artificial Artificial intelligence, Pseudo-AI and Faux-AI, the 
question we ask is: what trick made us loose sight of these laborious 
origins so to ingenuously believe that “Artificial Intelligence” was 
about intelligence?


Kevin B. Lee – The Generative Afterlife of an Extremist Archive

Generative AI algorithms can function as an inadvertent archive of 
illicit images such as extremist propaganda and violent content. Certain 
search terms can be used to access this archive, however transformed by 
algorithms that enforce safety on the one hand and reinforce aesthetic 
idealizations on the other. This presentation shares research related to 
an upcoming film that explores how the current state of online media 
shapes the memory, ethics, and rewriting of violent histories.


Orit Halpern – Speculative Nets: Artificial Intelligence, Finance, and 
Reactionary Politics

The talk will examine the relationship between psychology, neo-liberal 
economic thought, and technology since the 1970’s. I will discuss how 
ideas of democracy, freedom, agency, and decision making were 
reconfigured in terms of self-organizing systems, communication, and 
non-consciousness. I argue this change continues to inform contemporary 
politics, and shape how we understand institutions, ‘the human’ and 
technology.
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