Where Do Art History and Computer Science Meet? (drawing lessons with Amanda Wasielewski)

In episode 12, artist and thinker Amanda Wasielewski joins hosts Vass and Paul to discuss the crossover and interplay between digital and capital-A art.

Amanda, an associate senior lecturer of digital humanities and associate professor (docent) of art history in the Department of Archives, Libraries, and Museums at Uppsala University in Sweden, has exhibited her artwork internationally and recently published the monograph Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023) and co-edited Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era, with Anna Näslund (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Amanda brings her art historian perspective to questions of data politics, including categorization, authentication, nuances lost in automation, the need to be able to see data sets, and both the fears and artistic potential surrounding generative technologies.

In-Show Clips:

• 00:08:12: Rakutentech, “Computer Vision — The Now & The Future — Rakuten Technology Conference 2019” (YouTube, December 25, 2019)
• 00:11:14: SamDoesArts, “Why Artists are Fed Up with AI Art” (YouTube, December 24, 2022)
• 00:22:48: Watchseenart, “Is Damien Hirst Sloppy or Suspicious?” (YouTube Short, March 21, 2024)
• 00:49:56: The IT Crowd, “Series 2 — Episode 3: Piracy warning” (YouTube, March 18, 2009), parody of the original 2004 Motion Picture Association ad “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” posted by HelloImAPizza (YouTube, October 3, 2022)
• 01:00:42: The Wall Street Journal, “OpenAI’s Sora Made Me Crazy AI Videos — Then the CTO Answered (Most of) My Questions” (YouTube, March 13, 2024)
  

Mentioned:

• Artist Jack Bishop: https://jackbishop.ca/
• More about the Group of Seven: www.gallery.ca/whats-on/exhibitions-and-galleries/experience-the-group-of-seven-at-the-gallery
• On controversy surrounding dating of works by Damien Hirst: “Dating Discrepancy in Damien Hirst’s Formaldehyde Work Rocks Art World” by Rebecca Schiffman, Art & Object, March 25, 2024
• On “the famous case, which is still unresolved, of the painting of Christ…said to be of Da Vinci, but then said not to be”: “Salvator Mundi, Saudi Arabia and the saga of the missing masterpiece” by Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian, August 24, 2024
• On “this famous paper…which proposed a technique called StyleGAN, which was replicated on the website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com”: “Analyzing and Improving the Image Qualityof StyleGAN” by Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, Miika Aittala, Janne Hellsten, Jaakko Lehtinen and Timo Aila, preprint, arXiv, March 23, 2020
• Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, ImageNet Roulette project: https://paglen.studio/2020/04/29/imagenet-roulette/
  

Further Reading: 

• Amanda Wasielewski’s website: www.amandawasielewski.com/
• Amanda Wasielewski, Made in Brooklyn: Artists, Hipsters, Makers, Gentrifiers (Zero Books, 2018)
• Amanda Wasielewski, Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023)
• “Next book out this fall”: Since this episode was recorded, Amanda Wasielewski and Anna Naslund’s co-edited book Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era has been released, published by University of Chicago Press in November 2024
  

Credits:
Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our technical producers are Tim Lewis and Melanie DeBonte. Fact-checking and background research provided by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thomson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan and creative direction by Som Tsoi.

Original music by Joshua Snethlage.

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault.

Special thanks to creative consultant Ken Ogasawara.

Be sure to follow us on social media.

• X: @_policyprompt
• IG: @_policyprompt
  

Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt biweekly on major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at info@policyprompt.io.