Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary
A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
“The goal is to keep users engaged, meet message quotas, and never reveal who you really are. It’s work that demands constant emotional performance: pretending to be someone you’re not, feeling what you don’t feel, and expressing affection you don’t mean.”
“It is a chatbot which will enable users to pose political, historical, social questions, problems of organization and tactical initiative, and receive a response which draws on the vast archive of Marxist thought.”
“Why must everything, even death, be subjected to the bureaucratic rationality that has swallowed the horizon of what’s possible with computation?”
In anticipation of the 2027 opening of its new facilities, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) Pittsburgh teamed up with KADIST and EPOCH to offer a virtual tour of what’s to come. “The Generative Museum” is a detailed rendition of the forthcoming building, featuring a promptable exhibition that draws on ICA and KADIST’s vast collections. Another highlight: four AI works by Morehshin Allahyari, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Joe Namy, and Ahmet Öğüt.
“Consent is an ongoing, enthusiastic social contract that is mutable. You can agree to something, experience it, and then decide you don’t actually like it, and then you change the terms. But all of this needs to be in discussion in perpetuity.”
Famed for building a fully functional 1Hz CPU inside the Minecraft videogame, software developer Sammyuri introduces his latest in-game engineering feat: CraftGPT is a small language model that runs on a colossal computer hewn from 439 million Redstone blocks. With over 5 million parameters, trained in Python on the TinyChat dataset, CraftGPT works as advertised, but is prone to errors and a little slow: “It can produce a response in about 2 hours,” Sammyuri notes.
“Even Elon Musk, who’s probably warmer to Hitler than I am, doesn’t really want his LLM to say stuff like this. He might want to tilt it to the right but he doesn’t want to tilt it to explicitly supporting Nazis.”
To create Auto (2025), “a new type of autonomous vehicle developed in collaboration with the public,” LA-based artist and computer programmer Lauren Lee McCarthy invites LACMA visitors to take part in a series of interactive in-car performances. Each 45-minute ride simulates a different experience as new features are tested in a play between automation and control. “As the trip progresses, the distinction between system and human blurs—the riders become Auto.”
“When Body Is Not Enough” at SOMA Art Berlin is a deeply personal showcase of allapopp’s experimentation with identity, digital embodiment, and cyborgism. Known for their queer, non-binary, and tech-positive hacktivism, the Tartar interdisciplinary artist presents AI-generated avatar distortions and expanded selfs that critically examine how bodies—particularly female bodies—are mediated, augmented, and commodified by digital technology.
“Auto is freedom. Auto is ease. Auto is the feeling of moving at high speed into the future with nobody in the driver’s seat. Auto is out of control.”
“The voice of novel technological communication has been, almost from the beginning, a female voice, which is to say the voice of a helper, a perfect helper, pleasant, unflappable, immune to insults, come-ons and bossiness.”
Chatbots, deepfakes, AI hallucinations: “Ghosts” at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam interrogates our machine doppelgangers—“invisible, disembodied entities that hover between presence and absence.” Curator Anne de Jong brings together works by twelve artists including Simon Denny, Constant Dullaart, Alicia Framis, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Jen Liu, and Jonas Lund who venture into the liminal spaces of large language models where “these digital entities flicker in and out of existence, mimicking yet distorting humanness.”
“If chatbots can be persuaded to change their answers by a paragraph of white text, or a secret message written in code, why would we trust them with any task, let alone ones with actual stakes?”
“I love my human friends because they are not programmed to care about me, and they do anyway. Take that away, and I might as well be chatting with my Roomba.”
“But who was this ‘quite normal’ person? And what did she think of ELIZA? In this chapter of the history of talking machines, we only have one side of the conversation.”
“A world of sanitized, corporate AI is probably better than one with millions of unhinged chatbots running amok. But I find it all a bit sad. We created an alien form of intelligence and immediately put it to work … making PowerPoints?”
“Rather than a tool for dominance, akin to practices like data-driven racial profiling by law enforcement, it serves as a repository for quotations from diverse voices, generating a collective feminist intelligence rooted in diversity.”
“While politicians spent millions harnessing the power of social media to shape elections during the 2010s, generative AI effectively reduces the cost of producing empty and misleading information to zero.”
“‘Him’ didn’t live up to his promise. Four months after these virtual lovers were brought to life, they were put to death.”
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