AI: Artintelligence (InterArtes magazine)

Review edited by: Laura Brignoli, Silvia Zangrandi

Department of “Studi Umanistici”, University IULM – Milan

AI: ArtIntelligence

In the first two issues of InterArtes, we dealt with the “permeability of borders” and “hybridizations”, as so many key concepts of the contemporary world. But there is also another border to which this journal dedicated to research and reflection on artistic phenomena, in their broadest pluri- and inter-semiotic meaning, cannot fail to draw attention, especially in the he era of experimental hybridizations which seem to be tending towards its abolition: this is the boundary between what we call artistic creation and the products of automation. Artificial intelligence and the search for unlimited sources of energy characterize the imposing current trend towards “algorithmization” and what could be called the artificial turn of all human activity. It is the “arts”, understood in the broadest sense of practices inextricably dependent by their nature on historically singular contexts, which are invested with them in a particular way. In principle, the historical singularity of production contexts being a constitutive element of the process of artistic creation, all art would seem irreducible to utopias/dystopias of totalizing control and replicability; for this reason, until a few decades ago, artistic culture and academic-scientific culture could easily criticize the mechanistic reductionism of technologizing fantasies, opposing them to the complex uniqueness of each creative phenomenon. But it is obvious that today we are witnessing a reversal of perspectives: technological advances seem to point towards the artificial creation of complex singularities, that is to say towards the imitation or duplication of vital systems having the capacity to maintain itself over time while continuously varying and managing a certain amount of completely anti-mechanistic unpredictability. The process of artistic creation is obviously at the heart of this paradigm shift, the implications of which are aesthetic and scientific as well as ethical, political, but also legal, economic, social, environmental…

For these reasons, the third issue of the journal InterArtes will be devoted to critically questioning, both through historical and empirical essays, the relationship between “Artistic Creativity and Automation”. Here are some possible “tracks”:

– To what extent, at the speculative level and at the level of contemporary artistic practices, are these terms irreducible to each other, even contradictory?
– Has the neuroscientific research of the last decades brought novelties to the investigation of this question?
– What works, currents, schools, poetics have[-ils] actually used this conceptual dyad as explicit ideology or implicit figuration?
– To what extent is the panorama of contemporary art and literature characterized by artistic explorations of the expressive potential of a growing presence of technological innovations and to what extent, on the contrary, research and development technologies aim to replace human subjectivity also in artistic and literary creation?

These are questions that must be placed in the more general problematic of the relationship between art and technique; their common semantic rooting in the classical Greek idea of ​​technè is certainly linked with the rise, the affirmation and then the current structural crisis of thermo-industrial civilization: this foreshadows the risk of self-extinction of the species human but at the same time feeds increasingly frantic expectations of “singularities” capable of going beyond its physical and organic limits.

Among the research questions that this issue of InterArtes wants to encourage exploration, through one or more fields of artistic-literary production or aesthetic reflection, are the following by way of example and without claiming to be exhaustive :

– Which practices and which problems, from a historical point of view or from a point of view of contemporary experimentation and criticism, are inherent in the idea of ​​automation of the creative process? What about, on the other hand, the use of algorithms and automation technologies for non-automatable creativity?
– What particular points of contact and what distinctive elements characterize the theoretical comparison between literary practices of rewriting (and their analogues in other arts) and algorithmic processes of creation?
– What borders, what respective particularities, what possible interweavings and hybridizations can we identify between human subjectivity and the “artificial” subjectivities (AI) emerging in the processes of creation and artistic production?
– What forms (and historico-aesthetic dynamics) of artistic resistance to the dehumanization or transhumanization of the creative process is it possible to map, in the medium term of the long rise of automation technologies?
– In what literary and artistic works and research can we find forms of representation of this problem?

Modality of submission

The proposed texts, of a theoretical or analytical nature with theoretical premises, must be unpublished and written in word, in compliance with the editorial rules of the journal published on the site. and, once accepted by the Scientific Committee, they will be subjected to a double-blind evaluation.

We accept works in French, Italian, English.

Please send the contributions, together with a short bio-bibliographic notice, to the address: interartes@iulm.it, before June 15, 2023.