AI Futures for Art + Design

Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an award-winning artist, writer, and researcher whose work critically examines networked systems, interface culture, and emerging technologies. He is an Associate Professor of Digital Media and Networked Culture at Lehman College (CUNY) and a former visiting artist at Cornell Tech. His interactive artworks—often blending humor with subversion explore themes of control, surveillance, and system disruption.Brucker-Cohen’s projects have been exhibited internationally at leading institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art (where two of his works are in the permanent collection), ZKM, Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, MoMA, and SFMOMA. He has served as chair of the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery (2016) and Labs Chair (2024), and is co-founder of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA Group). Listen now on Spotify or join the AI Futures for Art + Design newsletter for written transcript and future announcements. Read it!Jonah Brucker-Cohen discusses his experiments with “machine forgetting,” including a clock that only displays the time you last looked at it, as a critique of permanence and surveillance in digital cultureHe describes interactive works that deliberately create friction, such as a hacked mouse that resists user control, in order to expose dynamics of power, autonomy, and coercion in AI systemsThe artist explores Expression of Memory, a calendar that uses facial recognition and sentiment analysis to record not just events but emotional states, reframing how we archive time and feelingReflections on AI art that misinterprets, refuses, or fails, and on practices that make visible the biases, infrastructures, and hidden labor behind artificial intelligenceClockWiseLinkExpression of MemoryLinkAGRO-MOUSELinkSaverLinkWeather The Times LinkSubtask LinkTrophy Camera Dries DepoorterLinkThe Prosthetic Photographer Peter BuczkowskiLinkThe Ghostwriter Arvind SanjeevLinkAtlas of AI by Kate CrawfordLink

Ross Goodwin employs machine learning, natural language processing, and other computational tools to realize new forms and interfaces for written language. From word.camera, a camera that expressively narrates its photographs in real time using artificial neural networks, to SUNSPRING (with Oscar Sharp, starring Thomas Middleditch), the world’s first film created from an AI-written screenplay; from making London’s Trafalgar Square lions roar poetry (“Please Feed The Lions” with Es Devlin), to writing a novel with a car (1 the Road), Goodwin’s projects and collaborations have earned international acclaim. Listen now on Spotify or join the AI Futures for Art + Design newsletter for written transcript and future announcements.In today’s episode: Goodwin's work reflects his interest in experimenting with the intersection of writing and computationThe evolution of language models, from Markov chains to sophisticated large language models like GPT-4 and reflections on the field of computational creativity.Ross Goodwin's projects, such as Sunspring and 1 the Road, demonstrate the intersection of art and AI, creating new narratives and experiences.1 the Road highlights the unique narrative possibilities and constraints associated with location, time, and imageryword.camera narrates photographs in real time using artificial neural networks, redefining the photographic experience and exploring the expressive potential of AI.Goodwin's collaboration with the Allen Ginsberg Foundation trains a large language model on Ginsberg’s archive and creates new texts Everyone loves David HasselhoffUntil next time, Kate