Art in the Age of Average. The new AI-thoritarians.

Conference
Tue, June 3, 18–21 and
Wed, June 4, 11–18 at AdBK Munich, Akademiestraße 2, Central Lecture Hall, free admis­sion

With: James Bridle, Gregory Chatonsky, Simon Denny, Navine G. Dossos,
!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Mat Dryhurst, Constant Dullaart, Antonio Somaini

There is a strange dis­con­nect in tech’s recent effects on pol­i­tics and cul­ture.

While cul­ture and art feel con­strained by data pop­ulism, scan­dal man­age­ment and mar­ket oppor­tunism, pol­i­tics is on a ram­page. Nothing seems impos­si­ble, from invad­ing or sell­ing Greenland or Gaza, abol­ish­ing cen­tral banks or food banks, to mak­ing Nazis great again.

AI plays a role in accel­er­at­ing the advent of auto­crat­ic rule. It assists in mak­ing peo­ple and social sys­tems redun­dant and super­flu­ous; it AI-wash­es aus­ter­i­ty with a “sci­en­tif­ic” sheen, it cre­ates tor­na­dos and wild­fires by burn­ing up nat­ur­al resources in data cen­ters, it gen­er­ates Aryans with six super­hu­man fin­gers to adver­tise for German hard right par­ty AfD.

AI indus­tries pro­vide tools for pop­ulists and auto­crats to pro­ceed like old school genius artists who defy taboos, laws and reg­u­la­tion to per­form cre­ative destruc­tion. Their near monop­oly indus­tries have vast lever­age over work­ers, mar­kets and users alike and rad­i­cal­ize the chasm between rich and poor. AI tools are brush­es, mag­ic wands and chain­saws in the hands of lib­er­tar­i­an strong­men.

In light of this coop­ta­tion – or shall we say coup­ta­tion? – we ask, how artists can recap­ture any cre­ative ini­tia­tive, or some form of artis­tic free­dom?

How do they/we escape mid-art, the mid­brow medi­oc­rity that comes with pimped and aver­aged mass data tweaked by par­ti­san AI mod­els? How to deal with the com­pe­ti­tion by full-on futur­ist per­for­mance art now oper­a­tional­ized by tech oli­garchs, bureau­crats and incel impe­ri­al­ists?

What kind of tools – if any – are nec­es­sary to open up dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties for recent tech­nol­o­gy? Avoid, trans­form or oppose? Stall, stake or speed up? How to do art when its tra­di­tion­al forms have been cul­tur­al­ly appro­pri­at­ed by mul­ti­po­lar dilet­tantes?

June 3, 2025

18.00 Gregory Chatonsky:

19.00 Antonio Somaini: Politics of Latent Spaces

June 4, 2025, Academy of Visual Arts Munich

11.00 Constant Dullaart: The hyper­re­al icon­o­clasm exploit

12.00 !Mediengruppe Bitnik: Unreal Data

13.00 Students of Emergent Digital Media Class: mid- life mid- art mid- jour­ney

14.00 Break

15.00 Mat Dryhurst: Protocol Art

16.00 Simon Denny

17.00 Navine G. Dossos and James Bridle

Moderation: Boris Čučković, Paul Feigelfeld, Francis Hunger, Hito Steyerl

Konzept: Hito Steyerl, Francis Hunger