Artists Statement

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Creative practice, Critical manifesto

All trade and business are slot machine readable, even more so after the advent of our social algorithms. Rewards of manipulation are easier to gather then to predict a reliable outcome. Drawing from the brain behavior-designers businesses, again, they must expand!
— AI, trained with  europeandataportal.eu, [2018-11-9T11:18:23+00:00]
Like any other activity nowadays also the creative practice converges with the realm of artificial intelligence. Assisting the act of creation by deploying AI is rapidly evolving into a common practice. If artists are to look beyond the “awe of implementation” to determine AI’s methods of influence and their specific effects then we need rules of engagement with those agents.

This document serves as a framework for the creation of a Critical AI Manifesto. It aims to scrutinise and subvert the technopolitical infrastructures of AI networks in order to spur more imaginative and critical dialogues regarding artificial intelligence’s impact and governance within the creative practices.

• Boris Debackere is an artist and researcher teaching at the Leuven University College of the Arts (LUCA, Belgium). Debackere is currently serving as the head of V2_Lab in Rotterdam, an instigator of artistic projects that interrogate and illuminate contemporary issues in art, science, technology, and society. His practice and research investigates the interplay of art with a socio-technological framework. In the field of digital art, his practice has a multimedial character with a recurring key concept: to experience the materiality and performativity of a medium that might appear to be a virtual environment. Debackere received the Liedts-Meesen new media nomination 2010, won the Georges Delete 2014 Prize for Best Original Music and Sound Design and received the 2015 Ensor Sound Design Award.
• Jerry Galle explores idiosyncratic uses of image and language that are co-created with algorithms. The mediation of the world through ever profiling, falsifying and quantifying images and texts that are both bot and human generated, have had a dramatic impact on conceptions of art, humour, absurdity, politics, economics and language itself. His practice critically reflects this mediation using websites, drawings, electronics and manipulated texts, presented both offline and in the public space of the Internet. Galle is a researcher and teacher at the School of Arts, University College of Ghent, Belgium. His work has been shown in Muhka, Bozar, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, British Film Institute, Wiels, International Film Festival Rotterdam, EMAF, International Film Festival Hamburg, Museum Dr. Guislain, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Ars Electronica among others. jerrygalle.com jerrygalle.xyz
• Steven Devleminck holds a Master degree in Engineering from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium and a PhD in Art and Philosophy from the University of the Arts, London, UK. Previously, he was the Director of the Transmedia Research Programme in Arts, Media and Design of the Leuven University College of the Arts (LUCA, Belgium), and visiting Professor at maHKU, Utrecht, NL. Currently he is the Head of the Mediated Environments Research Group at LUCA and Professor at the department of Computer Sciences at KU Leuven. His publications include books and a series of internationally published articles and conference papers. His practice based work has been shown internationally. Research interests are mediated environments, interactive technology, cartography and mapping. He is the Scientific Coordinator of the Innoviris Anticipate ‘Smart Urban Community Interface Blocks’ research project investigating the design of IoT toolkits for creating interactive urban interventions for both placemaking and civic purposes.

Full text (PDF)