Critical Image Synthesis: Glitching the AI Imaginary – Gray Area Festival Workshop

Critical Image Synthesis: Glitching the AI Imaginary – Gray Area Festival Workshop

Accessibility Update:
Please note that this workshop will be held in the upstairs Gray Area classroom, which is not ADA accessible. We apologize for any inconvenience and encourage those impacted to contact us for assistance. Thank you for your understanding.

An AI art workshop for AI critics. From Ben Laposky to Nam June Paik, artists who work with technology often work against it. The generative AI boom has led to a glut of kitschy and glossy reproductions from the style library of the datasets. They’ve been criticized for how their data is collected and for the biases these datasets contain. But generative computer art has a longer history, set apart from the history of photography and illustration favored by tools such as Midjourney and Dall-E. This history of computer art bends toward the creative misuse of systems to challenge their constraint on our techno-social and artistic imaginations. How can digital artists subvert the logic of these systems, and work toward a new visual vocabulary for AI?

As a founder of the Algorithmic Resistance Research Group (ARRG!) artist, writer, and researcher Eryk Salvaggio (cyberneticforests.com) explores generative AI as an adversary, rather than a collaborator. In this workshop, Salvaggio will explore conceptual and technical strategies for interrogating generative AI systems for images, video, and music. Attendees will leave with new ways of looking at how these models work, and have time to develop, test, and share their strategies.

This workshop is part of the  Gray Area Festival 2024.

Marking Gray Area Festival’s 10th anniversary, Gray Area 10 continues our annual survey of culture through the lens of creative practice, featuring a conference, performances, and workshops.