This talk reimagines art and authorship for a time when creativity is increasingly co-articulated with computation. It also raises questions of responsibility and meaning, for humans and machines. At stake here is not just the future of creative labour or the ethics of automation, but a deeper philosophical problem about our human modes of making things in the world -- and making sense of the world. Can a novel form of human thinking emerge as concept and image, author and system, converge within recursive loops of production?
Joanna Zylinska is an artist, writer, curator, and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is an author of a number of books, including The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (MIT Press, 2023) and AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020). An advocate of ‘radical open access’, she is an editor of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series for Open Humanities Press. Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. Zylinska is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while examining various narratives of collapse, be it on the level of AI models or planetary systems.
