T5 WK 8: AI and contemporary art
- Mar 30
- 7 min read
Artificial intelligence has become a major force in contemporary visual arts because it changes how images are produced, circulated, interpreted, and valued. More than functioning only as a tool, AI now operates as a collaborator, archive, filter, dataset, and system of authorship. Artists use machine learning to generate images, extend photographic and digital processes, construct speculative worlds, analyse data, automate movement, and create responsive installations. This expands creative possibility, but it also raises significant ethical and critical questions.
AI challenges traditional ideas of authorship because the artwork may emerge from a shared process between artist, software, dataset, prompt, platform, and machine-learning model. This unsettles the idea of the artist as sole originator. It also exposes the politics of training data: whose images, cultures, bodies, voices, and labour are absorbed into AI systems, and who benefits from that use?
In contemporary art, AI is strongest when artists treat it critically rather than simply using it for novelty. Artists such as Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Anicka Yi, Serwah Attafuah, Refik Anadol, and others demonstrate that AI can be used to question embodiment, memory, collectivity, identity, and systems of perception. AI-generated art can also become visually repetitive, commercially driven, and dependent on platform aesthetics. AI augments visual arts by extending process, scale, and experimentation, but it also challenges artists to rethink originality, consent, labour, materiality, and creative agency.
MoMA’s video is useful because it frames AI art as a shift in visual perception, not simply a new image-making tool. By focusing on artists such as Kate Crawford, Trevor Paglen, and Refik Anadol, the video positions machine learning as a system that must be examined critically rather than celebrated uncritically. Its strength is that it connects AI to data, surveillance, institutional archives, and machine vision, showing that AI does not "see" neutrally. It sees through classification, extraction, and pattern recognition. This is important for contemporary art because it moves discussion away from whether AI images are beautiful and toward how AI systems organise knowledge. The limitation is that the institutional framing can make AI appear more controlled and resolved than it actually is. The video provides a strong foundation for understanding AI as both creative process and cultural critique.
Matt Growcoot's article is significant because Cindy Sherman's AI experimentation exposes anxieties around authenticity and artistic legacy. Sherman's practice has always involved constructed identity, masks, self-performance, and unstable femininity, so AI logically extends her long-term investigation into mediated selfhood. However, the backlash discussed in the article reveals how audiences often separate "serious" art from digital experimentation, especially when AI is involved. Sherman's clarification that the images were not her "new work" shows the tension between play, research, and public reception.
The NGA resource on Jordan Wolfson's Body Sculpture positions technology as a way of staging embodiment rather than replacing the body. The work uses robotics, movement, scale, and mechanical force to create an encounter that is physically and psychologically charged. Although not simply an "AI artwork," it belongs in this discussion because it reflects how contemporary artists use advanced technologies to question agency, control, consciousness, and human vulnerability. The robotic form disrupts expectations of sculpture as static object. Instead, the artwork behaves, performs, and confronts the viewer through movement. Its critical value lies in the way it makes technology feel bodily, unstable, and difficult to separate from human emotion. Wolfson's work also raises questions about spectacle and institutional power, especially when technological complexity becomes part of the artwork's authority. The work is important because it transforms machine-based art from a mechanical process into a physical encounter, where technology is experienced through the body, movement, and psychological response.
Vault's Alison Kubler's interview is valuable because it gives insight into Wolfson's thinking around consciousness, technology, mindfulness, and AI. Rather than presenting Body Sculpture only as a technical achievement, the interview frames it as part of a wider inquiry into what it means to be human. Wolfson's interest in consciousness complicates a simple reading of the work as robotic object. The machine becomes a vehicle for exploring vulnerability, perception, and bodily presence. This is relevant to AI and contemporary art because it suggests that technology can be used to intensify questions of human experience rather than distance the viewer from them. The interview's tone is strongly artist-centred, which means it offers limited critical distance from Wolfson's own claims. Its strength is access to the artist's conceptual framework; its limitation is that it does not fully interrogate the ethical and institutional conditions surrounding high-cost technological artworks.
The Art21 resource on Anicka Yi is important because Yi's practice expands technology beyond screens and digital image generation. Her work engages scent, biology, decay, robotics, artificial life, and non-human intelligence. This makes her highly relevant to AI because she questions whether intelligence and knowledge are exclusively human. Art21 identifies Yi's interests in the body, world-building, uncommon materials, sensory experience, and research-based practice, which positions her work within a broader ecological and posthuman context. Her use of deterioration and perishable materials challenges the clean, frictionless aesthetics often associated with digital technology.
Vault's Emma Collerton's article presents Serwah Attafuah as an artist who approaches digital technology as an extension of imagination rather than a threat to creativity. Attafuah's work is important because it combines digital art, 3D world-building, Afrofuturism, gaming influences, and imagined forms of identity. The article's discussion of digital exhibition and immersive display shows how AI and digital tools can move beyond flat-screen presentation into spatial experience. Attafuah's practice challenges the assumption that digital art is detached from cultural memory or lived identity. Her work demonstrates how virtual spaces can carry ancestral, contemporary, and imagined meanings. However, the article's connection to Gucci, Mercedes-Benz, Nike, Valentino, Paris Hilton and commissioned digital outcomes also raises questions about the relationship between experimental digital art, branding, and cultural capital. Its value lies in showing that AI and digital technologies can be used to construct new visual languages of identity rather than simply automate image production.
The Call is one of the strongest examples of AI being used critically rather than passively. Herndon and Dryhurst do not treat AI as an invisible generator of content, instead, they make the process of training data, consent, and collaborative production central to the artwork. Serpentine describes the project as proposing new cultural, legal, and technical rituals for art in the age of AI. This is significant because the work addresses one of the central ethical issues of AI: the extraction of creative labour without proper recognition. By working with community choirs and a Data Trust experiment, the artists create a model of AI collaboration based on participation and shared power. The work's strength is that it turns AI infrastructure into artistic material. Its critical importance lies in showing that AI art must address not only image production, but also governance, authorship, and consent.
This article is useful as a broad overview of how artists use AI, virtual worlds, and immersive technologies to expand contemporary practice. Its strength is accessibility, demonstrating how digital tools can support world-building, interactivity, imagined environments, and expanded forms of audience engagement. As a general survey, it risks presenting technological innovation as automatically progressive. In critical terms, the value of virtual worlds and AI depends on how artists use them conceptually. Technology alone does not make work significant. It becomes meaningful when it produces new ways of thinking about identity, perception, space or social systems. The article helps map the field, but it needs to be supported by more critical readings that examine ethics, platform control, access, labour, and the politics of digital representation.
Create a digital artwork inspired by the theme "Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder":
CNET’s article is practical rather than theoretical, but it is useful for understanding the commercialisation of AI image generation. Its comparison of tools such as DALL-E 3, Leonardo AI, Canva, and Adobe Firefly shows how AI image-making has entered mainstream creative workflows. The article is valuable because it identifies editing, customisation, accessibility, and professional integration as key factors in AI image production. However, from a contemporary art perspective, the limitation is that it frames AI mainly through usability and output quality. It does not fully address authorship, training data, copyright, cultural bias, or the visual sameness produced by platform-based tools. This makes it useful for technical awareness, but less useful for critical art analysis. Its relevance lies in showing how quickly AI has moved from experimental practice into commercial design infrastructure, creating new pressures for artists to distinguish critical practice from automated image production.
References:
Anicka Yi in "Bodies of Knowledge" Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 11 2023, ART 21, viewed 30 March 2026, <https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s11/anicka-yi-in-bodies-of-knowledge/>.
Art21 2023, Anicka Yi in "Bodies of Knowledge" - Season 11 | Art21, YouTube, viewed 30 March 2026, <https://youtu.be/FGp8EKFUqko?si=QhiAUMDgUYhoH6JO>.
Best AI Image Generators of 2025 2025, CNET, viewed 30 March 2026, <https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/best-ai-image-generators>.
Collerton, E 2023, AI: Artificial Imagination – No Threat to Serwah Attafuah, Vault, viewed 30 March 2026, <https://vaultmagazine.com/issue_features/serwah_feature_ISS44.php>.
Growcoot, M 2023, Peta Pixel, Cindy Sherman is ‘Experimenting’ With AI and Not Everyone’s Happy, viewed 30 March 2026, <https://petapixel.com/2023/08/23/cindy-sherman-is-experimenting-with-ai-and-not-everyones-happy/>.
Jordan Wolfson Body Sculpture 2024, NGA, viewed 30 March 2026, <https://nga.gov.au/on-demand/jordan-wolfson-body-sculpture/>.
Kubler, A 2023, Q&A:Jordan Wolfson, Vault, viewed 30 March 2026, <https://vaultmagazine.com/ISS44/jordan_wolfson>.
Meggs, M 2026, Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, AI-generated image created using ChatGPT, OpenAI, 2 June, viewed 30 March 2026 (Figure 13)
Meggs, M 2026, Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, AI-generated image created using Wix, OpenAI, 2 June, viewed 30 March 2026 (Figures 10-12)
MoMA 2023, AI Art: How artists are using and confronting machine learning: How to See Like a Machine, YouTube, viewed 30 March 2026, <https://youtu.be/G2XdZIC3AM8?si=jhS-KlfhIXpaifci>.
National Gallery of Australia 2024, Jordan Wolfson Body Sculpture, online video, YouTube, viewed 30 March 2026, <https://youtu.be/2cuvC5C2r9w?si=PoDhLjDg05uBsYR2>.
Serpentine 2024, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst: The Call: Serpentine, Youtube, viewed 30 March 2026, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNlr7olF6rE>.
