Ignorant Visions is a website where I document research conducted as part of my PhD project “Generative AI and the Art Museum: The Online Collection of British Art, Audiences and Visuality”.
Investigating machine learning as a predictive and visual technology with cultural ramifications both in its origins and present direction, my project seeks to produce new knowledge through practice-based experimentation in an art museum context.
Informed by current conversations in museology and critical software studies, my project centres the need for public spaces where collective knowledge production about generative AI can take place (Sonja Thiel, Johannes Bernhardt, et al. 2023). As a technology that is both pervasive in everyday life and notoriously complex to approach, there is a need for public engagement to enable a democratic discussion and regulation of AI and its use in public life. The art museum, as a site of mediation with cultural heritage, is ideally situated to open up the “blackbox of AI” through experimentation in creative engagement and learning practices.
Adopting the stance of “ignorant learning” (Jacques Rancière, 1987) and alternative collective pedagogies, my process aims to identify and develop creative ways to deploy AI in relation to the Tate gallery’s online and away-from-keyboard (Legacy Russel, 2020) collection of British art. I will be striving to build prototypes that will enable us to reverse-engineer the technological blackbox, the human labour behind the algorithms, the ideological embeddings of machine vision and hopefully generate collective ways of inventing new technological imaginaires (Gilbert Simondon 1957, Ruha Benjamin, 2019)
The Ignorant Visions website is part of this prototyping process. It is a collection of writings and visual experiments that record and archive research as it is being conducted. It works as a repository for material having immediate relevance to the project, as well as material that struggles to find its place at the present moment. Following the strategy of continuous prototyping, this material might find future relevance and uses still unknown to me. This site is also an exercise in making accessible the sources and resources behind the project to a wider audiences, whilst also providing a pretext to keep building scientific research in formats other than academic articles and conference papers.
(Views expressed on this website are solely my own and do not express views or opinions of partner institutions)
Sources
Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology : Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code / Ruha Benjamin. Cambridge, UK ; Polity, 2019
Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford, USA; Stanford University Press, 1991
Russel, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London, UK; Verson Books, 2020
Simondon, Gilbert. « Prolégomènes à une refonte de l’enseignement (1954) », , Sur la technique. (1953-1983), sous la direction de Simondon Gilbert. Presses Universitaires de France, 2014, pp. 233-253.
Thiel, Sonja and Bernhardt, Johannes C. (Ed.). AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2023
Homepage Visual
Animation produced using RunwayML Image-to-Video Generator. Prompt: extract from The Man with a Movie Camera. By Dziga Vertov. Directed by Dziga Vertov. Screenplay by Mikhail Kaufman. 1929;2020. All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU).