Artificial Intelligence as an Artistic Medium

In recent years, artists have turned to AI as a medium for doing art, as an artistic collaborator, and as a way of making robotic art machines. This talk by Colin Johnson (IASH Research Fellow) will give an overview of these ideas, with an emphasis on the aesthetic ideas that are enabled by AI in the arts. The talk will end with a consideration of how AI-based art can contribute to critique and analysis of our increasingly algorithmic society and the role that machine learning algorithms play.

Colin Johnson is a reader in the School of Computing at the University of Kent specialising in AI and machine learning, and a Digital Scholarship Research Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Whilst on his fellowship, he is completing a book reviewing interactions between AI and the arts.

Chaired and introduced by Dr Drew Hemment, Chancellors Fellow at Edinburgh Futures Institute, and lead of Experiential AI.