The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

[jody2.718]

Mark:

But this ain't even artificially close to Benjamin's.

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From the article itself:

"As a tactic, destabilizing and defamiliarizing the audience in the service of politicizing aesthetics predates digital computing. At the conclusion of his 1935 essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” philosopher Walter Benjamin observed the material reproducibility of art forms “revolutionizes” the social function of art itself, potentially moving it from a basis in religious ritual to one based on political struggle (Benjamin 2008: 25.) Benjamin argues that revolutionary artists must juxtapose tactics provoking both destabilization and reflection in order to awaken a progressive political consciousness in their audience. Art acknowledged as both a product of collective sociotechnical endeavor—as made by many people working together—and for a collective audience was for Benjamin the most effective means to transcend habituation, shocking viewers into a reconsideration of their political situation. For Benjamin, cinema was the technologically mediated art form most amenable to the production of radical politics. “Art,” he suggested, “will tackle the most difficult and most important tasks where it is able to mobilize the masses” (Benjamin 2008: 40). The jarring formal or technical aspects of a medium like cinema (or the mixed-media collages favored by the Dadaists) worked to reinforce their historically contingent role as psychologically and emotionally disruptive for the viewer, turning “the artwork into a missile” (Benjamin 2008: 39).

At the time of its introduction, the novelty of the cinematic form had a visceral impact: the “shock effects” of its form were matched by its widespread proliferation as a familiar component of everyday urban life. This defamiliarization within familiarity was what Benjamin suggested produced potent political reflection on the part of the audience. For Benjamin, the audience’s heightened presence of mind was a potential source for individual political revelation and by extension political revolution. In the case of the data artists interviewed, the milieu in need of defamiliarization is not limited to the dark confines of the cinema but consists of the digitally mediated contours of everyday locations and experiences.We argue that artists working with data tools today are finding new means to produce visceral effects in the service of defamiliarizing familiar forms of digitally mediated interaction. Benjamin recognized the ways in which a continuum of destabilization effects could exist across different media formats, as well as the link between embodied sensation and ethical judgment. Benjamin suggested defamiliarization stems from the visceral and embodied experience of the body. “Film has freed the physical shock effect,” Benjamin writes, “which Dadaism had kept wrapped, as it were, inside the moral shock effect” (Benjamin 2008: 39). This physical process triggers a heightened sense of mental reflection; as such, viscerality is foundational to an ethics of aesthetics."

And:

"Benjamin’s famous closing declaration to “The Work of Art in the Age of Its TechnologicalReproducibility” claims both “the logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life” (Benjamin2008: 41) and “communism replies by politicizing art” (42). As a response to the fascism of human “self-
alienation,” in which politics is aestheticized through a technological apparatus that, in Benjamin’s terms,
is “pressed into the production of ritual values,” the digital artists in our study responded by tactically
foregrounding the political and ethical implications of their work through the production of visceral and
emotional effects. Artists intended these effects to prompt “heightened presence of mind.” Whether these
practices were always successful, artists clearly felt that the politicization of digital aesthetics was necessaryto have an ethical impact, particularly in an era of rising populism around the world."

To the above, you might consider the work of Leni Riefenstahl for Benjamin's time. For now, Donald Trump is a good example of the aestheticizing of political life.
The article is not in competition with Benjamin's, but uses it as a framework to discuss the role of artists using a new tool to create their art. It ends with:

"As computational tools become standard across creative practices, artists working to illuminate the privacy
and surveillance with large-scale data have an important role to play in the wider data ethics discussion.
“When we start automating systems and abdicating personal judgments—you know what kinds of biases
emerge in those systems,” Dewey-Hagborg observed [interview]. “I noticed that my own mistakes and faults
and biases got implanted in the systems I was making. And so that made me concerned about the potential
for real injustice happening when these systems were automated.” We argue conversations in the art world
around the pragmatic ethics of data art practice are in fact a positive model for other computational fields to
follow: artists saw value in reaching shared normative practices through engagement between artists and
audiences, suggesting a model for participation and collaboration often missing in other forms of digital
research and development.

We suggest society at large will be increasingly called on to make the kinds of judgments—aesthetic, ethical,
and political—that the artists we interviewed were simultaneously exploring, critiquing, and struggling with.
The ethical practices of artists working with computational tools are relevant to the wider debates about data
ethics, not just because they invoked technical systems but because they were seeking to make explicit those
parts of technology in everyday life that tend to slip below the surface (Boehner et al. 2007). Rather than
being sidelined in the debates about ethics in artificial intelligence and data practices more broadly, artists
should be centered as practitioners who are already seeking to make public the political and cultural tensionsin using data platforms to reflect on our social world."

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