SESSION: Art is Dead: Long Live the Artist – Creativity in the Times of AI
For over a century, the “death of art” has been repeatedly anticipated. From the invention of photography in the late 19th century to the rise of mass printing, digital illustration, NFTs, and now artificial intelligence, each wave of technological innovation has raised existential questions about the future of artistic practice.
This panel, “Art is Dead: Long Live the Artist,” seeks to critically explore the historical and contemporary tensions between artistic innovation and emerging technologies. It argues that technology has never truly undermined traditional art forms; rather, artists have consistently transformed perceived technological threats into opportunities for experimentation and subversion.
The discussion will investigate how the ever-evolving nature of technology mirrors the very essence of artistic creativity—fluid, adaptive, and boundary-pushing. This shared mutability makes technology particularly well-suited to alternative forms of expression, enabling artists to subvert conventions, challenge dominant aesthetics, and amplify marginalized voices through new platforms and modes of engagement. Panellists are invited to reflect on how artists have not only endured, but often flourished, by turning technological disruption into a tool for both critical inquiry and creative expansion. At the heart of this inquiry lies a pressing question: what new forms of authorship, authenticity, or resistance emerge when artists collaborate with machines?
Panel aims to:
To critically examine the historical interplay between technological innovation and artistic practice.
To explore how contemporary artists engage with emerging technologies not only as creative tools but also as a means of generating critical dialogue.
Session Convenors:
Kanwal Syed, American University in Dubai
Speakers:
Kanwal Syed, American University in Dubai
Reclaiming Movement: Subverting Technology in Farida Batool’s Nai Reesan Shehr Lahore Diyan
Farida Batool’s artwork “Nai Reesan Shehr Lahore Diyan,” illustrates how artists can reshape even the simplest technologies, using them against their conventional purposes. Through low-tech methods, she confronts high-impact photographic propaganda, turning minimal technologies into potent tools of critique and resistance. Her work exemplifies how contemporary artists can subvert and mould technologies, transforming them into powerful agents of cultural and political dialogue.
Batool’s Nai Reesan Shehr Lahore Diyan (2006) employs lenticular printing—a simple, toy-like technology—to challenge the dominant visual narratives of post-9/11 media. The piece depicts a young girl skipping rope in front of the charred remnants of buildings after the 2006 Lahore riots, creating a stark contrast between playful innocence and political destruction. The lenticular animation gives the girl’s figure the illusion of movement, allowing her body to shift across multiple positions. This movement directly counters the static, over-circulated imagery of veiled or victimized Muslim women that dominated Western photographic propaganda.
By choosing a dynamic adolescent girl, Batool disrupts stereotypes of passive Muslim female bodies, using the animation to foreground agency, mobility, and presence. The technology exposes the rigidity of global media representations while re-contextualizing the political unrest in Lahore through resilience rather than spectacle.
Batool’s use of low-tech lenticular printing becomes a vehicle for political critique, generating complex counter-images that challenge dominant cultural narratives. Her work demonstrates that simplicity in technology can be a powerful strategy for rethinking authorship, authenticity, and resistance in contemporary visual culture.
Diogo Rodrigues de Barros, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History
Crisis and Death of Modern Art: A Comparative Analysis of Italian and Brazilian Debates in the 1960s and 1970s
In the late 1970s, Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan declared the death of art, or more precisely, the death of the aesthetic project of European modernity. This was the culmination of a crisis that had begun in the previous decade. He saw the development of mass culture and the international spread of pop art as a failure of art to contribute to social change and, ultimately, to revolution. At the same time, in Brazil, critic Mário Pedrosa shared similar concerns, suggesting the end of modern art and the rise of postmodern art. Like Argan, Pedrosa ended up adopting an equally pessimistic position on the death of modern utopias in the late 1970s. Not only did European modernity seem to have failed, but so did the developmentalist project that had guided Latin American artists and thinkers since the 1950s. My paper will compare Argan and Pedrosa’s ideas on the crisis and death of modern art, with a particular focus on their interpretation of mass media as a threat to critical thinking and democracy in Europe and South America. It is relevant to revisit this debate given current concerns about artificial intelligence and the circulation of fake news, and their effects on individuals’ ability to engage critically with reality. Are we currently facing a new death of art or, on the contrary, a reaffirmation of the role of art and the artist in promoting critical thinking in the face of the challenges posed by recent technologies and economic powers?
Selçuk Artut, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey
Tradition in Code: From Geometry to Generativity
Throughout history, technological innovation has repeatedly been perceived as a threat to artistic authenticity, yet artists have continually redefined these disruptions as sources of renewal. This paper traces such a continuity through the evolution of geometric abstraction—from the sacred geometries of the Islamic Enlightenment to the algorithmic aesthetics of contemporary generative art. The geometric artisans of the medieval era, working with compass and straightedge, transformed mathematical inquiry into visual revelation; today, creative coders employ algorithms to achieve similar syntheses of logic and form.
Through a practice-based inquiry grounded in creative coding, this study examines how the principles of symmetry, repetition, and procedural construction that once governed sacred pattern-making now re-emerge in digital art as agents of both preservation and reinvention. By reactivating historical geometries through computational processes, generative art exemplifies how artists continue to transform technology’s perceived threat into a site of aesthetic experimentation and philosophical continuity—affirming that, far from dead, art perpetually reconfigures itself through its dialogue with machines.
Sarena Abdullah, Universiti Sains Malaysia
From Vision 2020 to Machine Vision: Artistic Reimagination in Selected Works by Malaysian Artists
Roopesh Sitharan and Mohd Hafizuddin’s award-winning project C.U.L.T: Continuous Uninterrupted Linear Training (2020) signals the significance of algorithmic critique within the region’s art-science field in Malaysia. The prognostication of “the death of art” is reframed in the works of these three Malaysian artists, and this presentation will argue that art does not perish; rather, it transforms through critique, disruption, expansion, and artistic reimagination. I will examine Eddie Wong’s Portrait of the Jungle People / 山芭佬 (San-Ba-Lou) (2022). The work uses AI-generated imagery to resurface the figure of the san-ba-lou (meaning rural or marginalized “jungle people”) in Malaysian society—thereby engaging with questions of representation and memory through machine vision. Another work that I will examine is the collaborative work between Chuah Chong Yan (artist), Lay Sheng (political theorist) and Zhi Wee (creative technologist), At the Dawn of the New Millennium / Our Span of Control Is Almost 1 (2021), that reframes the turn of the millennium through digital layering and speculative futurity, interrogating authorship, normative aesthetics and technological agency through the subject of Wawasan 2020 or Vision 2020. Taken together, these works demonstrate that artists in Malaysia or Southeast Asia at large are not victims of technological disruption; rather, they are transforming technology into subversive, culturally specific practice. By engaging with machines as collaborators and provocateurs, these artists reclaim authenticity by developing critical inquiry and artistic reimagination—thus affirming that art is, in fact, not dead.
Ehryn Torrell, Loughborough University
Analogue Cuts, Algorithmic Visions: Feminist Montage in the Age of AI
What does it mean for a feminist artist to create in dialogue with artificial intelligence? This paper develops an experimental, practice-based method that tests how generative AI ‘sees’ feminist art, extending a montage process first established in my PhD to critically engage material cut and assembled from Heresies (1977–1993). Trained on the LAION-5B dataset of 5.85 billion image–text pairs, image generators such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion reproduce vast visual cultures that flatten histories, aesthetics, and politics. Following Johanna Drucker’s (2011) claim that “data are capta, taken not given,” and Griselda Pollock’s (1993) reminder that archives are never innocent, this project stages a creative confrontation between feminist imagery and machine vision.
Using a two-stage montage process, the first stage—primary montage—involves cutting and assembling selected images from a single issue of Heresies, leaving deliberate gaps for AI to fill; in the second—secondary montage—I return to the detritus of the magazine and invite AI to imagine what is missing. Primary and secondary montage offer two distinct sets of human-machine compositions discussed in this paper. These works test how AI translates and misreads feminist visual culture, exposing its homogenising tendencies while opening space for critique and creative agency.
Montage has long served feminist artists, from Hannah Höch’s interwar photomontages onward, as means to critique media and technology. The paper reimagines montage as a site of ethical negotiation between analogue and digital materialities—proposing an innovative feminist practice that both collaborates with and critically interrogates AI.