GAVNet Collaborative Curation

Social platforms—in their effort to keep users continually engaged (and targeted with relevant ads)—are designed to surface what’s popular and trending, whether it’s true or not. Since nearly half of web-using adults now get their news from Facebook in any given week, what counts as "truth" on our social platforms matters. When nonsense stories gain traction, they’re extremely difficult to correct. And stories jump from platform to platform, reaching new audiences and "going viral" in ways and at speeds that were previously impossible.

The research indicates worldwide losses in productivity could be as high as 40% by 2050 if climate change is not stymied. 

In industry, there is blunt-force algorithmic tension – ‘Efficiency, capitalism, commerce!’ versus ‘Robots are stealing our jobs!’ But for algorithmic art, the tension is subtler. Only 4 per cent of the work done in the United States economy requires ‘creativity at a median human level’, according to the consulting firm McKinsey and Company. So for computer art – which tries explicitly to zoom into this small piece of that vocational pie – it’s a question not of efficiency or equity, but of trust. Art requires emotional and phrenic investments, with the promised return of a shared slice of the human experience. When we view computer art, the pestering, creepy worry is: who’s on the other end of the line? Is it human? We might, then, worry that it’s not art at all.

But the honest-to-God truth, at the end of all of this, is that this whole notion is in some way a put-on: a distinction without a difference. ‘Computer art’ doesn’t really exist in an any more provocative sense than ‘paint art’ or ‘piano art’ does. The algorithmic software was written by a human, after all, using theories thought up by a human, using a computer built by a human, using specs written by a human, using materials gathered by a human, at a company staffed by humans, using tools built by a human, and so on. Computer art is human art – a subset rather than a distinction. It’s safe to release the tension.