As the capabilities and challenges of generative AI evolve at an unprecedented pace, this essay collection examines its relationship with contemporary art.
Between 2018 and 2024, generative AI evolved from rudimentary language models and image and video generators into powerful multimodal systems and AI agents. The volume Six Years: A Report on the Generativization of the Arts, 2018-2024 studies the interrelation between art and AI. Generative AI represents systems with novel cognitive and agential capabilities. It changes whose knowledge and experiences count and dislocates labor relationships and authors' rights. It enables new forms of control and surveillance and drives an enormous consumption of energy and raw materials. Artistic and literary practices respond in a range of ways: appropriative, critical, abolitionist. With a nod to Lucy R. Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, this book gathers essays, a curated AI art dataset, and a chronology of the years from 2018 to 2024. Writings by Jonny-Bix Bongers, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, A.A. Cavia, Orit Halpern, Christian Heck, Charlotte Kent, Joan Kinyua, Egor Kraft, Anna Kraher, Mattis Kuhn, Emily Martinez, Lars Pinkwart, and others shed light on the aesthetic and political dimensions of generativization.