Can AI-mediated art enhance democracy? (Berlin event July 2-4)

On July 2-4 I will join the event “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human and Machine Creativity” in Berlin. Among a fantastic lineup of speakers including scholars and artists interested in AI and creativity, I will pitch some ideas about AI-mediated art and political skills. The abstract of my short talk is here below:

“Creativity is a political act. By taking creative actions we state the possibility of change, we verify the possibility of participating in the construction of the (social) world, to challenge the received views and practices, to create new forms of common life. To realise its political potential, creativity requires that persons make a direct, embodied experience of change, their potential role in it, the challenges that comes with it. All democratic education – claims French philosopher Jacques Rancière – is an aesthetic experience. It is an open question to what extent AI-mediated art and aesthetic experience can enhance, support, or rather endanger the political potential of art and creativity. That crucially depends on how much AI will support the embodied experience of injustice and the possibility of achieving direct participation in building new social practices and social change. In this philosophical talk, I will rely on literature at the intersection between radical pedagogy, democratic theory, and aesthetics (Dewey, Freire, Rancière) to start sketching a normative framework to assess the impact of AI on aesthetic experience and creativity. At the center of the framework is the question to what extent AI can improve our democratic skills or rather create “political deskilling”, as political skills crucially depend on our ability to make meaningful embodied experiences.”