Disruption and Progress: Reflecting on Digital Art Practice
Artists are often seen at the forefront of innovation in using emerging technologies as they seek to reflect on society and disrupt established norms, from the early experiments of Nam June Paik’s video art in the 1960s to the contemporary explorations of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s interactive installations. However, with the ubiquity of digital technologies, it is increasingly important to be aware of the contradiction between disruption and progress. This entails recognising that whilst new technologies initially promise innovation and progress, it is crucial to acknowledge the ‘bias of the machine’ (Steyerl and Vikram, 2023) and the ‘digital divide’ (Mukhopadhyay and Thompson, 2021) that have caused global disparities in digital production and access.
Therefore, this session invites researchers and artists to reconsider the tension between disruption and progress, exploring digital art’s relation to the dilemmas, stereotypes, and hierarchies accelerated by rapid technological development. This includes questioning social norms, traditional concepts, representations, and ways of seeing and thinking. We also welcome proposals that consider how art historians and artists throughout history have confronted these questions in connection to changing technologies of image-making and how these may inform and aid us in current debates.
Session Convenors:
Georgia Gerson, University of York
Man Li, University of York
Yuxuan Xiao, University of York
Speakers:
Kristen Lewis, Concordia University
The Catch-22 of Participating with Data-Driven Interactive Art
Emerging data-driven and algorithmic dependent technologies present a familiar predicament for artists: do they participate, or not? Through participation, artists may enrich their practice and contribute to the technology’s critical development. The downside to participation is that the artist concedes to contribute their own data to inform datasets that improves potentially dangerous technology. In the context of technocapitalism, the improvement of technology does not always lead to a beneficial social and political outcome, and instead may increase political subjectivation. While training facial or voice algorithms to better recognize racialized people improves the diversity of the dataset, challenging algorithmic bias, it also improves their surveillance capacities. For these reasons, artists may choose to not participate in these technologies but forgo how their critical contributions could challenge the normative development and subvert potential harms. Faced with such a catch-22, what is the way forward?
In this paper I interrogate this predicament through analysis of Stephanie Dinkins’ ongoing project Not The Only One (N’TOO) (2017-), an interactive data-driven chatbot. N’TOO avails of a Huggingface model trained on Dinkins’ Black American family’s oral histories, relevant context, and the community voices of those who interact with the bot, with the intention to create a multi-generation memoire of her family through the lens of AI. Through analysis of this work alongside the theoretical insights of Gillian Rose’s concept of the ‘broken middle’, an ethical approach emphasizing the incommensurability at the heart of ethicopolitical life, I interrogate the complexity of the participatory predicament with data-driven art.
Francis Summers, University of the Arts London
Training Lessons: Threat and Shame in Martine Syms’s Mythiccbeing
Martine Syms’s Mythiccbeing (2018)is a digital video work that incorporates an AI (named Teeny) with whom the audience can interact via text message. Trained on data supplied from Syms’ highly personal texts, later published as the book Shame Space (2020), this AI entity is designed to be an ‘anti-Siri’, an unhelpful digital assistant mindful of its own needs before the needs of those who hail it. Installed amidst threat maps that model a danger-filled navigation of the world this work speaks of subjectivity and technology entangled with corporeality and affect.
This paper will situate this work with Syms’ other works and interests that involve training of both machines and bodies, such as her Neural Swamp (2022) and Capricorn (2019) as well as her writing on Pope.L (in relation to her own training to crawl). Placing this work in conversation with other artists involved in training chatbots and AI through specific limited datasets, such as American Artist’s Sandy Speaks (2017) and Stephanie Dinkins’ Not the Only One (2018), this paper will address current debates around contemporary digital art and machine learning that refute false universalisms and techno-theological fallacies. Against simplistic models of AI as existential threat, this paper will argue that Syms’ training of AI as a ‘thickness of being’ poses urgent queries around the varied status of the human, its vulnerability and the represented matter of lives in evolving digital media.
GAO Shiyu, Birmingham School of Art
Subverting the Digital Eye: AI, Surveillance, and Expanded Media Art in Xi Jinping’s China
The rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies has intensified concerns regarding privacy, data security and the constant threat of surveillance, espionage, and censorship, especially within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Xi Jinping’s rule of China since 2012 has utilised advanced AI algorithms to expand control over every aspect of daily life with the ever-tightening sphere of censorship and constraint. AI contributes to the PRC’s construction of ‘surveillance culture’ as David Lyon identifies, through ‘organisational dependence, political-economic power, security linkages, and social media engagement’ (Lyon 2017, 826). The PRC’s adoption of new surveillance methods and control mechanisms generates new forms of institutional power asymmetries.
The paper focuses on artistic creation with AI media to reflect the PRC’s increasing surveillance apparatus rising from ordinary people’s everyday online activities even though that is already being carried out by the government and giant tech corporations like ByteDance. Through a close critical analysis of multimedia artworks, including Miao Ying’s (b. 1985) Chinternet Plus (2016) and Rhett Tsai’s (b. 1995) Static Sky: And Yet It (2024), the paper shows the diverse artistic strategies to question the legitimacy of the expanding monitoring in Xi Jinping’s new age of ‘digital China’. The paper intends to argue how contemporary artists create alternative subjectivities and identities as a political counter-surveillance approach to challenge systemic inequalities and restraints.
Eszter Polonyi, University of Nova Gorica
The Origins of Identity Recognition in Spectacle
This paper is about methods used by artists and activists today to challenge digital facial recognition. It relates these to a range of popular games and ludic practices in the 19th century whose purpose was to arrive at an articulation of identity through play. It starts by investigating attempts to move digital recognition processes away from the face within communities of artists, (Zach Blas, Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Adam Harvey), activists (ReclaimYourFace, ProtectNotSurveil, BigBrotherWatch), and computer engineering researchers (Computer Vision Lab, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia). While largely appearing within the context of civil disobedience, techniques designed by these collectives bear out critical theory’s call for an ethics of “opacity” or a “right” to disappear from surveillance (Glissant, 1997) by obscuring the visibility of faces using wearable head gear, makeup, hair styling, or through retroactive digital facial de-identification or masking techniques. The chapter legitimates such practices by placing them within a genealogy of “play” (Tania Bruguera) and wonder (Gunning 2004) stretching back to 19th century philosophical toys. Making palm prints, casting shadows, producing inkblots, draining tea leaves, and dripping wax, a generation of “seers” emerged who read identity off traces of absent bodies. Materials on character divination come from the “Magic” section of the Warburg Library and manuals housed at the Bodleian within the history of physiognomy (silhouettes), astrology (horoscopes), chiromancy (palmistry), and psychology (inkblots) in order to recover a tradition in which identity media are appropriated and designed for purposes that are mimetic (Taussig 1993), but also “protective” (Cassetti, 2023).
Jennifer Kennedy, Queen’s University
Feminist disruptions in cyberspace
Tartanya/Adelaide Australia, Summer, 1991: Artist-activist collective VNS Matrix “crawled out of the cyberswamp…spewing forth” the collaboratively written “Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century.” Although their citational, stream of consciousness tract is widely accepted as the first recorded use of the word “cyberfeminism,” VNS Matrix caution against mistaking it for an origin story. Cyberfeminism, according to collective member Virginia Barratt, was “never faithful to any origins.” Even if it is not an origin story, VNS Matrix’s narrative provides an exceptionally rich metaphor for analyzing the rapidly changing vicissitudes of meaning around the new virtual worlds that began to take form with the rise of the internet. The image of a cyberswamp––a space between, a complex and biodiverse ecosystem brimming with life and matter––offers a powerful alternative to the imperialistic connotations of then-popular conceptions of cyberspace as terra nullius or “new frontier.” As James Bridle argues, the problems created by technologies are never only a matter of function (how they work, what they do, etc.), they are also a matter of imagination. Remediating society’s myriad tech-related problems, therefore, does not necessarily, or only, require creating new technologies; it also requires new metaphors, new stories about technology. This paper charts the critical, theoretical, and technological contexts in which VNS Matrix’s vision of cyberfeminism was formed to analyze the unique ways in which it disrupted dominant narratives about the internet at the very moment that they were endeavoring to establish themselves and gaining wide acceptance and asks, what if the story of the world’s largest mass media had been told a different way?
Tengjin Bian, Loughborough University
Posthuman VR Drag: Body Drifting in a Queer Time and Place
This chapter examines posthuman VR drag through a queer failure lens (Halberstam, 2020), highlighting VR’s unique role in redefining bodily representation and embodiment. It analyzes three queer VR projects Virtual Drag(2016), Duchampiana (2024), and Body of Mine (2023)–in which digital avatars function as posthuman drag (Dawson, 2023), challenging conventional ideas of space, time, and the body. These works emphasize intentional glitches, disorientation, and body drift as tools to resist dominant power structures and norms, in contrast to mainstream VR’s drive for realism and embodiment (Burrell, 2023).
In Virtual Drag (2016), photogrammetry and glitch aesthetics to reimagine and re-enact the virtual body of drag kings and queens at the level of data processing. The simulated and digital elements are intentionally stitched together in obvious, imperfect ways. Duchampiana (2024) introduces a wooden nude climbing an endless staircase, symbolizing an orientation loss and temporal dislocation and that offers an intriguing model of queer time—one that disrupts linear narratives and stable structures, embracing queer temporality and spatiality. In Body of Mine (2023), a full-body VR experience, the transgender body serves as a digital agency that players can control. Players oscillate between affirming bodily autonomy as they successfully manoeuvre this digital form and questioning it due to technical delays and disconnections. This sense of instability and discontinuity within the VR project becomes a site for play, challenge, deconstruction, and creative exploration.
Genevieve Strong, University of Aberdeen
Ghosts of Progress: Reimagining Victorian Photography through Virtual Reality in Mat Collishaw’s Thresholds
The recreation of the first exhibition of photography in Mat Collishaw’s virtual reality installation Thresholds (2017) presents a powerful dialogue on technological anxiety, bridging the Industrial and Digital Revolutions. By inviting audiences to embody ghostly avatars that interact with digitally reconstructed Victorian artifacts, Collishaw both disrupts and reimagines our engagement with the past. Digital art becomes a space where past and future anxieties converge, amplifying the tension between preservation and progress. This paper will explore how Thresholds leveraged both virtual and augmented reality to collapse temporal boundaries, challenging the audience’s perception of authenticity in historical narratives. Situated within the framework of Neo-Victorianism, it will explore how Thresholds reshapes historical narratives by invoking Victorian-era fears of mechanisation, a resonance with today’s ‘digital divide’, and contribute to current debates on digital media’s potential to challenge stereotypes embedded in historical representation. This paper will analyse Thresholds in the context of digital art’s capacity to disrupt linear time and evoke nostalgia, offering a unique avenue for art historians to interrogate how digital media reframes both history and memory in the age of virtual spectacle. Furthermore, it will consider how Thresholds provokes a reconsideration of traditional modes of seeing and interpreting history, questioning how digital art might reconstruct these views in response to contemporary societal hierarchies.
Richard Carter, University of York
There Should be No Digital Art – Troubling Digital Creativity with Permacomputing Practices
In 1970 pioneering computer artist Frider Nake wrote an essay “There Should be No Computer Art”, which delivered scalding critique of what he saw as the-then excessive hype around the role of computing technologies and the future of the visual arts – whereupon the technology was the real star of the show, as opposed to a vehicle for drawing together connections and ideas that are revealing of the current situation. Much contemporary digital visual art, in its various manifestations, still retains a tendency to celebrate the technological sophistication at play – especially now, in-light of generative AI – and offer relatively little self-reflexivity regarding the nature and status of their own interventions. At a moment when digital systems and infrastructures are becoming an increasingly extreme source of planetary harm – exhausting resources, polluting environments, automating violent conflicts, and fuelling the consumption of fossil fuels – it is more imperative than ever that attention is given over to digital practices that deliberately trouble and indeed challenge the very premises of digital creativity as a useful worldly intervention. This paper will explore the artists own practices in dialogue with ideas around so-called “permacomputing”, that creatively interrogate potential digital futures in a permanently degraded planet. As with Nake’s essay, the aim is not to wholly dismiss digital creative practices, as to encourage a much harder critical interrogation of their often fraught ecopolitical entanglements and implications.