BSA Annual Conference 2023, ‘The Democratization of Artistic practice: AI and Embodied Knowledge’
British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2023, Sociological Voices in Public Discourse
Date: 12-14 April 2023
Location: University of Manchester
Session: Science and Technology Studies
13 April 2023 Oral Paper Presentation
The democratization of artistic practice: AI and embodied knowledge
Tomoko Tamari
Abstract
The paper examines a contemporary art and technology discourse which suggests that the expansion of artificial intelligence can lead to non-hierarchical and democratic artistic skills and sensibilities. In doing so, the paper explores the limitations of the digitization of embodied knowledge in relation to human artistic practices and experience. Given the rapid expansion of AI technologies, Bernard Stiegler expresses his concerns about ‘symbolic misery’ which is characterized by a loss of human participation in aesthetic practices and machinic hypomnenata. Yet the question of how human embodied knowledge could be replaced by machines, or how machines can copy human skills remains. Hubert Dreyfus explores ‘skillful coping’ which is an embodied technique and knowledge for human intelligence, and argues that the human brain doesn’t work like a heuristically programmed digital computer in acquiring skills, rather it is a holographic connectionist system. Furthermore, when it comes to human perception, which is an important faculty for artistic sensitivity, Michel Henry emphasizes importance of the ‘auto-affective’ which occurs in ‘one’s relation to one’s own being’. This process takes place in a subjective body. Although AI can engage in ‘self-evaluation’ to refine its system with a preprogrammed computational algorithm and trained sets of data, it doesn’t mean AI has a subjective body; it operates with different mechanisms from human subjectivity. Hence, the paper argues that AI’s alleged democratization of ‘human-like’ artistic practice has not yet been achieved, since current AI is still incapable of being programmed to take into account complex embodied knowledge and experience.