Angewandte Praxis – Maddening the Machine: Drawing and AI

Lecture, Discussion and Workshop

Building on his earlier engagement with drawing as trace in Derrida and springing from disegno and scribble in the Renaissance, Michael Newman will explore the double nature of drawing: as trace of what has passed, associated with memory, and as generativity, associated with the future. Following the development of a new model for a book-as-performance in Mallarmé’s posthumously published notes, known as Le Livre, Newman will explore, retrospectively, an AI archaeology of drawing made using chance (from Alexander Cozens to Marcel Duchamp and John Cage). This will lead to a rethinking of the role of randomisation, noise and the uncomputable in the formulation of an AI imagination (Cécile Malespina and Luciana Parisi). Based on a discussion of the work of British artist Toby Christian using an AI, the suggestion will be that partnerships between human artists and AI, involving bodily gesture and a choreography of making, show that imagination may be conceived not as a faculty of the individual subject, but rather as inhering in relation. The hope is that artists’ practice with AI generativity may open up radical transformations and unforeseen potential in the relations between humans and machines. However, returning to the trace will also raise inescapable questions of finitude and ethics.
 
Michael Newman is Professor of Art Writing at in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds degrees in English literature and art history, and a PhD in philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He has published numerous essays on modern and contemporary artists as well as thematic essays on the wound, the horizon, contingency, memory, drawing, and nonsense. He is co-director of the new Drawing Centre for Humans and Machines at Goldsmiths University in London, UK.
 
This event is a cooperation between Support Art and Research and Transmedia Art.