March 11, 2025
3:00 pm PST
Online via Zoom
Watch WGSS jointly affiliated faculty member Gloria Sutton in her upcoming talk at the Getty!
Pattern Recognition traces the stealthy intrusion of artificial intelligence in everyday imaging apps and the way visual representation is now reconfigured as “datafication.” This talk connects the rise of AI visual creation tools and the mass digitalization of analog artworks to Art History’s own reliance on the virtualizing force of reproductive surrogates and proxies (photographs, 3D models, augmented reality) to study works across time and distance from the inception of the discipline. If art history relies on historical interpretation and visual analysis to advance the field’s precept that context determines meaning, what does it mean now that images are not captured or even edited, but “prompt engineered” through text to image tools? The fundamental role of “art” and “aesthetics” within the shift to AI image creation tools such as Open AI’s DALL-E , Stable Diffusion and Midjourney positions Art History to critically consider their impact on how we understand visual culture. I outline how software and hardware become extinct, not because they are outmoded, but because they are no longer compatible with current operating systems and memory formats which are physical computing’s metaphors for the cognitive functions for the very human way we process and recall information from memory. To this end, I outline how digital affordances join humanistic endeavors in the act of identifying “the fleeting, the ephemeral, and the unrecoverable” and discuss the critical stakes of digital realia closely reading select artworks that have fallen off the historical record because they are not digitally classified, archived, or searchable.
Click here for the Zoom webinar link.
Passcode: 804070
Webinar ID: 939 0183 7927
