MeshUp #29: Curating, collaboration and working with AI
This week, Eamon O’Kane presents Curating, collaboration and working with AI: from digital narratives to the artist’s studio.
Abstract
The talk follows a series of exhibitions and research projects developed with Scott Rettberg and the Centre for Digital Narratives at the University of Bergen, and asks what happens when exhibition-making is treated as a form of research. It begins with Hyperobjects, co-curated and shown in Bergen and Berkeley, which gathered artistic and research practices around climate change, ecology, technology and Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject. It continues with Posthuman, developed around the Electronic Literature Organization conference at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design.
The main case is More Than Meets AI, an international exhibition and research project shown in Bergen, Berkeley, Chicago and Lake Forest, which examines what AI means for creativity, narrative and artistic production, and the questions it opens about authorship, mediation and the relationship between human and machine-generated images.
From there the talk moves into painting. O’Kane’s essay “A Human Story of Working with AI in the Artist’s Studio: Painting, Mediation, and the Question of Intentionality”, published in Contemporary Perspectives on AI and Narrative by the Open Library of Humanities, comes out of his own studio practice. It does not ask whether AI will replace painters. It asks a narrower question: what happens when an AI-generated image enters the studio, and what does it mean to paint from one. The argument draws on Isabelle Graw on painting as a “quasi-person”, Gilles Deleuze on the diagram and bodily sensation, N. Katherine Hayles on embodied cognition, and Foucault and Michael Fried on the tableau.
The through-line is a claim about artistic research: that it can make spaces where an emerging technology is not demonstrated or discussed, but tested critically and materially.
Bio
Eamon O’Kane is Professor of Visual Art at the Art Academy, University of Bergen, and sits in the leadership group of the university’s Centre for Digital Narratives and the Extending Digital Narrative project. His artistic research works on materiality, memory, technology, ecology and systems of knowledge, across painting, sculpture, installation, moving image and research-based projects.
He is co-principal investigator and artistic leader of the Climate Narratives project, funded by the Research Council of Norway, which connects climate scientists, social scientists, artists and communities in Greenland and the Pacific, and artistic leader at ILLU.gl. He takes part in the KulturVerkSted project on culture-based responses to societal challenges, in the New European Bauhaus Compassionate Commons initiative, and is artistic consultant on the ERC “#WARS” project at the Chr. Michelsen Institute. Recent projects, among them Studio Munch House, A Good Picture Never Disappears with Ciara Phillips, and Gimme Shelter with Matthew Flintham, take Edvard Munch’s demolished house at Ekely and disused bunkers in Bergen as spaces for culture, community and preparedness.
Access
MishMash MeetUps are short, informal meetings in the consortium where both early career and established researchers present ongoing projects. The events are open for everyone, but, for security reasons, Zoom links are only provided to people that are affiliated with a MishMash Work Package. If not, please ask for access. The MeshUps are not recorded since we want these short events to also serve as a social meeting point for the centre.
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