Paper short abstract:

By analyzing AI-art as metapictures, how can we learn not only what a viewer “sees”, but what the viewer forges alongside imagistic vectors and visual grammars? When are held captive by the ethereal movement of AI, how do we contribute to a dominating image of “algorithmic objectivity?”

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I dwell upon the phenomenon of movement within AI-generated artworks to ask how these pieces draw mutating lines that remain apprehensible to the viewer, interrogating the digital images produced by these machines and the orders of representation that they reference within their active drawings. In his book Picture Theory, WJT Mitchell refers to “pictures that refer to themselves and other pictures” as metapictures, or images that carry their own pictorial grammar that is apprehended by the viewer (Mitchell 1994: 35). In a Wittgensteinian sense, Mitchell invokes an “ordinary language” view of pictures and images, one which treats representation in images as orders of discourse that show processes of self-reflection and referentiality (37). I analyze AI-art along a similar lens, asking not only what the viewer sees when algorithmic processes morph a portrait, but what does the artwork enable the viewer to see in its display of a digital image? How do the lines that diagram portraits in Memories of Passersby I operate as vectors which, in drawing the contours of a figure’s face, also draw the viewer’s attention to the image’s underlying grammar of references? I argue that we should trace these lines’ transformations to the imagistic figures that undergird their visibility to us, the viewers. We should attend to the ways that the gaze of the AI’s ethereal portraits catches our vision and holds us captive through its perpetual movement and our respective anticipation for its rearrangement. Doing so, we find that these metapictures invoke a presupposed image of “algorithmic objectivity” as vectors which catch the viewer’s gaze and reproduce themselves as our own desire for computational order.

Paper short abstract:

Based on experiments with drawing, painting, and other arts-based methods during digital ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores how creative methods enable new forms of representation while simultaneously raising new theoretical and ethical concerns and considerations.

Paper long abstract:

New visual regimes have prompted us to reimagine the notion of the ethnographic image and our relationships to it. This paper explores my own experiments with creative methods during digital ethnographic fieldwork with queer performance artists in Toronto who adapted their performance practices to digital platforms during the pandemic. These experiments with drawing, painting, and other artistic mediums arose as a means to capture images of queer digital spaces in non-photorealistic ways in order to maintain my interlocutors’ anonymity and prevent doxing and harassment in these spaces. Later, as my interlocutors found themselves increasingly pushed off of mainstream public platforms due to targeted homophobic and transphobic harassment, these practices would help me to visually represent the constructed silences and absences in my interlocutors’ virtual worlds.

Based on these experiments with creative methods in digital ethnography, this paper asks what constitutes an ethnographic image or (post)image today. Locating my own work within larger discussions around the ethics of visual and filmic ethnographic representation, this paper explores how arts practices can change how we engage with the field and how we represent its complexities. Moreover, this paper explores the ethical considerations of working with artistic ethnographic images, arguing that while these methods addressed my initial ethical concerns, they raise new considerations and questions around representation and the nature of the ethnographic image itself.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I discuss how the combination of visual art and ethnographic fieldwork can be useful not only to disseminate anthropological research in a creative way, but also to slow down thinking. The researcher cannot not rush assuming the form of the phenomena she studies.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I discuss how the combination of visual art and ethnographic fieldwork can be useful not only to disseminate anthropological research in a creative way, but also to slow down thinking. The researcher cannot not rush assuming the form of the phenomena she studies. Any concept once named starts functioning as an object, which in turn delimits our exploration. Since sharpening our observational skills deeply shapes our way of knowing and thinking we need to develop methods to nurture a reflexive act of seeing.

Between March and November 2021 I carry out an ethnographic fieldwork to examine how the research subjects used social media and their experience of being an artist with minority background in Norway. During the fieldwork I developed a series of artistic fieldnotes that consists of digital drawing and short literary texts which turned to an art travelling exhibition at the end of the fieldwork.

The travelling exhibition, ARTivisme, travels through public libraries starting at one of the most cultural diverse parts of Oslo. ARTivisme is a complex project with different goals. The main aim is to explore: 1) how to create anthropological representations outside academic texts, 2) how to intervene in a very polarised digital and non-digital public conversation about the politics of belonging in Norway. Which lenses are best suited to approach racism, belonging and exclusion? Are the lenses of emotions, reason, own experiences or the experiences of others? Is it creativity, is it academic argumentation, empathy, closeness or distance?

Paper short abstract:

Building on the insights from the ARTlife research project and Film Collective, this paper considers the imperative to discuss how our insights and the images we co-produce (should) enter into larger media- and knowledge infrastructures and ecologies - and thus the formation of mediated publics.

Paper long abstract:

Building on the insights from the ARTlife project and Afghan-Danish Film Collective (Waltorp and ARTlife Film Collective 2021), this paper considers the imperative to discuss how the images we co-produce enter into larger media- and knowledge infrastructures and ecologies - and thus the formation of mediated publics. Images are circulated and consumed at an unprecedented scale with a staggering 3.2 billion images and 720.000 hours of video uploaded daily (Thompson et al. 2020). An estimated 59.5 percent of the global population have access to the Internet, 92 percent of them mobile-only. Images have moved us since early woman made Rock Art; used in ideological battles and spurred political action, as we know from early Russian formalist cinema (Eisenstein 1964, Vertov 1923), Hollywood cinema (Powdermaker 1950), propaganda (Berger 1969) and in the colonial-imperial sciences (Azoulay 2019).

The digital age makes for other kinds of circulation and impact than previous scholarly contributions. This paper engages with questions of productive friction in terms of responsibilities: In the collective, we use and make images to co-articulate imagined futures, and what it means to be both Danish and Afghan. As a response to recent developments in Afghanistan, our collaboration has come to include support events and talks on- and offline on the changing position of women in Afghan society and diasporic (hashtag) activism around this topic. In this process we tag, circulate, and inadvertently contribute to a flow of images. What is the role of the anthropologist in this changing ecology and flow of images?