From Art and Technology to AI: artists’ collaboration with big tech

As generative AI increasingly impacts in fields of artistic creativity this chapter seeks to examine the entanglements of creative production and AI. However, these relationships are increasingly defined in terms of the binaries of displacement or augmentation, with the more nuanced continuum of collaboration, co-creation, and co-option less attended to. While AI narratives prioritise the novelty and exceptionalism of these technologies, the chapter makes the case that, while novel, these technologies – and their associated anxieties, moral panics and techno-optimisms – share characteristics from previous generations of new technologies. This analysis, it is suggested, can guide us in our contemporary moment.
This chapter argues that an examination of the collaborative processes at the heart of artists’ historical engagement with new technologies, both critical and otherwise, can illuminate these debates and point towards modes of operation and critical positions toward AI as these technologies mature and become assimilated.
Curatorial processes, formal and informal, lie at the heart of these histories. The chapter will examine key moments from the history of art and technology from this perspective to identify how moments of friction functioned in the collaborative process, as roadblocks or genuine moments of transdisciplinary transcendence. This will include the Art and Technology programme of the LA County Museum in the United States (Tuchman and Livingston, 1971) and New Tendencies in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 70s (Rosen, 2011), as well as generative art (Boden and Edmonds, 2009) and locative media (McGarrigle, 2012) in the 1990s and 2000s.
The chapter will contextualise contemporary processes of collaboration and industry engagement with AI technologies through the lens of these old technologies (Marvin, 1988), to point toward a mode of operation that allows for critical engagement with these new technologies, while cautioning against the recuperative power of the AI industry.