AI and Digital Media Aesthetics
Recording of CDN seminar April 21st 2024.
Main content
Putting aside both hype and hysteria, how is AI affecting digital media aesthetics?
Large language model based-AI is clearly a transformative phenomenon, heralded by many as the most significant change in computational technology since the birth of the World Wide Web or the dawn of ubiquitous computing. The widespread use of contemporary AI brings with it both great hopes for innovation and great fears of displacement, or even of "existential risk" to human life itself.
During this half-day international research seminar we will put aside both hype and hysteria. Digital artists and electronic literature authors join literary critics and digital culture researchers for presentations and discussion focused specifically on AI’s effects on digital media aesthetics.
How does AI offer new possiblities and new environments for creative expression? How can art and literature in turn serve as critical environments for exploring AI’s impact on technology?
How will aesthetic forms such as the essay, the short story, narrative cinema, digital poetry and interactive digital narrative change and respond to AI?
This event is cosponsored by the Center for Digital Narrative, the Extending Digital Narrative project, and the Machine Vision ERC.
Speakers
12-12:30 Sandwiches, introduction
12:30-13:30 Panel 1, Moderator: David Jhave Johnston
- Ben Grosser, University of Illinois: “Your perspective is quite insightful”: Deconstructing the Endless Engagement Aesthetics of AI Platforms
- Mario Aquilina, University of Malta: AI and Essayistic Writing: Initial Thoughts
- Aurora Hoel, NTNU: Unreasoned images? On the operational status of AI-generated imagery
13:30-14:30 Panel 2, Moderator: Lina Harder
- Scott Rettberg, UiB: The End of the World as AI Know It: Text-to-Image Generation as a Narrative Form
- Drew Keller, UiB: Emerging trends in generative video and media production
- David Jhave Johnston, UiB: An excerpt from Hallucinations Are (almost) All You Need
14:30-14:50 Break
15:00-16:00, Panel 3, Moderator: Jill Walker Rettberg
- Alinta Krauth, UiB: AI, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?: Report on the Leonardo interspecies poetics project
- Lina Harder, UiB: Building the Nethersphere. Artificial Intelligence and the Reanimation of Historical Minds
- Gabriele de Seta, UiB: An algorithmic folklore: Vernacular creativity in times of everyday automation
16:00-16:40, Panel 4, Moderator: Scott Rettberg
- Jill Walker Rettberg, UiB: How to analyse machine vision in 500 video games, movies, artworks and novels: Machine vision situations and the Database of Machine Vision in Art, Games and Narratives
- Jason Nelson, UiB: Semi-intelligent mutation machines: exploring AI's unintentional artistic possibilities or persistent error-making as creative tool
16:40-17:00 Discussion
Center for Digital Narrative (CDN)
Humanities-driven research in electronic literature, games studies, digital culture, and computation to advance understanding of digital narrative.
CDN is a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence funded by the Norwegian Research Council from 2023-2033. CDN focuses on algorithmic narrativity, new environments and materialities, and shifting cultural contexts.
