Inaugural lecture by Adjunct Professor Palle Dahlstedt

Art, Tech and the Spectrum of Agency: AI as creative tool, artistic partner or autonomous artist?

A pragmatic, critical, and visionary view of what machine learning and artificial intelligence brings to the table for art. Pragmatic in the sense of analysing what can actually be done today by artists working with AI, and what is missing in terms of creative agency. How does AI relate to other technologies in the context of art? Yetcritical about the popular expectations of AI, its ascribed ability and agency, and how AI is written and talked about today. (No, computers cannot paint like van Gogh!) What is really the role of humans, as designers, programmers, users, tweakers, in current AI applications? Still visionary about the long term future of AI in art. Will we ever see autonomous AI artists? If so, why would they even care to make art for humans?

Palle Dahlstedt is a composer, artist and researcher from Sweden. He has worked with advanced algorithms in music and art since the 1990s, from a variety of perspectives: as developer of new technologies, algorithms and tools, as an artist and performer using these technologies, and as a thinker researching aesthetic and cultural implications of advanced technologies in art. He was Obel Professor in Art & Technology at AAU from 2015 to 2018, and is from November 2019 again Adjunct Professor in Art and Technology. Dahlstedt is also head of the Division of interaction design at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg, and lecturer in electronic music composition at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg.

See also: Palle Dahlstedt bliver adjungeret professor i kunst og teknologi på Aalborg Universitet