AI and Artistic Practice
Sam Pluta, Brea Souders, and Eryk Salvaggio
Composer and sound artist Sam Pluta, visual artist Brea Souders, and video artist and writer Eryk Salvaggio each use and interact with AI in their artistic practice. They will introduce us to their work, reflecting on their experiences, doubts, and breakthroughs creating works using these technologies. This will be followed by a discussion moderated by UMBC Assistant Professor of Art Eric Millikin.
Eryk Salvaggio is a blend of an artist, hacker, researcher, and writer, exploring artificial intelligence’s social and cultural impacts. Working with AI since 2018 and critical tech art for more than 25 years, his work explores the creative misuse of AI and the transformation of archives into training data. His practice is designed to expose ideologies of tech and to confront the gaps between datasets and the worlds they claim to represent. Salvaggio will discuss two of his creative works: SWIM, a video that connects several critical approaches to AI, including creative misuse and the analysis of underlying datasets and invites contemplation of the technical mediation of cultural memory; and Because of You, a video essay created with Dr. Avijit Ghosh that reflects on the reliance on dominant patterns in a dataset to create new images, which often elide or erase minority identities.