Latent Space Art Academy

This week I've shared v1.0 of my Critical Topics: AI Images undergraduate class alongside recordings of lectures (including guest lectures). The class is an introduction to data ethics and media studies through histories of computation and art. Right now, six lectures are online, two of them guest lectures.

The first, with Paul Pangaro, walks us through cybernetics & art through the work of Gordon Pask. The second, with Anuradha Reddy, is an introduction to her creative practice, particularly, using AI to generate knitting patterns.

The class starts with the principle that AI images can be read as data visualizations, but each class dives deeper into specific aspects of making images with AI: their histories, social and cultural context, technical details, and application. AI is a multidisciplinary field, and it’s impossible to teach it meaningfully if you stay too narrow. By focusing on AI image making specifically, we get to look through the ways AI “sees” and how we can redefine our relationship with the tools on offer.

The class is a lot of work and I’m proud of how the lectures are coming together, so I’ve opted to make them public. There are no students in the videos — they are pre-recorded and watched together while we discuss in real-time over Discord, which is a very 2023 classroom arrangement. But that means I get to put a little extra craftmanship into them over a standard classroom lecture.

Here’s an overview of the first few classes; you can also visit the course page with the button below to see what’s coming (though it’s subject to change).

Class One: Love in a Time of Cholera

An introduction to AI generated images as infographics or data visualizations. We compare AI images to John Snow’s 1855 maps of the London Cholera epidemic to see how data moves into images — and how reality is transformed as it is collected and represented. (20 minutes)

Class Two: Cybernetic Serendipities

A history of machines as metaphors for intelligence; moving to the transdisciplinary approach of cybernetics, the intermedia approaches of Fluxus, and Pop Art’s democratization of art to uncover how computers and art came together by 1968. This section tackles neural networks, Turing machines and cybernetics alongside the work of Jasia Reichardt, Vera Molnar, Ben Laposky, Lilllian Schwartz, Gordon Pask, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol and Harold Cohen. (1 hour 18 minutes)

Class Three: AI & Cybernetics, Computation & Art

Paul Pangaro offers a deep dive into cybernetics and the influence of Gordon Pask on both art and conversation theory. Pangaro, of Carnegie Mellon University and President of the American Society for Cybernetics, has restored one of Pask’s artworks shown at the original Cybernetic Serendipity show at the ICA London in 1968. In this talk, we hear about Pask’s long body of work and one history of human-computer conversation.

Class Four: Who Decided the Colors of Birds?

Contemporary AI is defined by the use of data. But what is data? Where does it come from? Class four explores the shift of AI to expert systems in the 1980s, before the internet arrived and conceptualized society as a giant neural network. We look at the data explosion and how the need to make sense of that data shifted thinking around AI. Finally, we look at the legacy of an 1812 dataset defining colors — and how datasets describe the world. (54 minutes)

Class Five: Images And Surveillance: Nobody Is Always Watching You

Some of the same AI technologies and training data used to make AI art tools are also used in surveillance systems, both in the United States and abroad. We explore some of the social issues around AI images. Particularly, AI image datasets of faces and issues of race and gender in surveillance technologies. Adapted from my 2021 keynote talk, From Big Brother to Big Data: Nobody is Always Watching You. (1 hour 7 minutes)

Class Six: Artist Talk, Anuradha Reddy

Anuradha Reddy (website) is an interdisciplinary design researcher based in Sweden. Her research practice includes interaction design, user research, data technologies, creativity, and hacking. She has a practice-based PhD in Interaction Design from Malmö University, Sweden. By day, she works in the software industry as a design researcher. Outside her day job, she continues researching ways to bridge professional ML/AI expertise with informal communities of makers/hackers through craftivist and critical approaches to design. Her recent design work has been covered in conferences, journals, periodicals and zines. She is an open advocate of FOSS/libre design and collaborative technologies. She holds workshops, talks, and writes for magazines. (39 minutes)

This is version 1.0 of this course and I’d love to hear your feedback! If you watch a class (or all of them) let me know what you think. So far the feedback has been extremely positive, and I’m grateful (and relieved!).

I have dream that this can be the starting seed of a book on the subject. If you know anyone in the business of publishing defiantly transdisciplinary histories of art, AI and media studies, feel free to send this their way. (And if that’s you, let me know if you’d like to talk!)

I’ll be sharing new videos as they come, one at a time, over the rest of the term with some summaries.

Fun!

Things I am Doing (Soon): The Data Fix

If you’re eager to hear more of my voice, I’m very delighted to say that on February 10 I will be the guest on Mél Hogan’s excellent new humans-and-technology podcast, The Data Fix. We chat about AI images and what they “mean” — it was a lot of fun and I am excited to hear the final cut of the conversation. Subscribe now to catch it when it comes out!

Things I am Doing (Soon): ‘New Paradigms’ Workshop

I’m also speaking at the exciting New Paradigms workshop in Tübingen, one of the first academic conferences I’ve seen to connect media studies to Diffusion models. You can catch it streaming on February 13 and 14, but you have to register in advance (details on the link). Excited to read through the many thoughtful papers being presented!

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