Events
History & Theory

ONLINE: Art & AI

History & Theory
16 Apr, 2020

ONLINE: Art & AI

with Christiane Paul
Chief Curator / Director of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Professor at The New School and Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Response from Claudia Schmuckli
Curator-in-Charge of Contemporary Art and Programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

A History and Theory of New Media Lecture, co-sponsored by AutoLab, Arts + Design, the Arts Research Center, Art Practice, BAMPFA, and held in conjunction with the DH Faire.

This event will be online 5:00-6:30pm PST on April 16

Join us at berkeley.zoom.us/j/538818961

In 1920, Karl Capek coined the term "robot" in a play about mechanical workers organizing a rebellion to defeat their human overlords. A century later, increasing popularism, inequality, and xenophobia require us to reconsider our assumptions about labor, trade, political stability, and community. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, fueled by corporations and venture capital, challenge our assumptions about the distinctions between humans and machines.

To explore potential linkages between these trends, the term "Robo-Exoticism" characterizes a range of human responses to AI and robots that exaggerate both their negative and positive attributes and reinforce fears, fantasies, and stereotypes.

Christiane Paul, Chief Curator / Director of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Professor at The New School and Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, discusses her upcoming exhibition on art & AI and its relationship to robo-exoticism in this upcoming program, with a response from Curator-in-Charge of Contemporary Art and Programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Claudia Schmuckli.

About Christiane Paul

Christiane Paul is Chief Curator / Director of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, as well as Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation's 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and her books are A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, May 2016); Digital Art (Thames and Hudson, 2003, 2008, 2015); Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts(Intellect, 2011; Chinese edition, 2012); and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 - 2018 (2018), Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011) and Profiling (2007), and is responsible for artport, the museum’s portal to Internet art. Other curatorial work includes Little Sister (is watching you, too) (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NYC, 2015); What Lies Beneath (Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, 2015); and The Public Private (Kellen Gallery, The New School, NYC, 2013).

About Claudia Schmuckli

Claudia Schmuckli is the inaugural Curator-in-Charge of Contemporary Art and Programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Since joining the Museums in 2016, she has developed exhibitions and commissions with Sarah Lucas, Urs Fischer, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Leonardo Drew, DIS, and Ranu Mukherjee and acquired works by The Propeller Group, Carrie Mae Weems, Tony Feher, Jessica Stockholder, and Terry Adkins. Previously, she was Director and Chief Curator of the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, where she organized over thirty exhibitions including solo shows dedicated to Matthew Ronay, Analia Saban, Slavs and Tatars,Candice Breitz, Tony Feher, Johan Grimonprez, Gabriel Kuri, Chantal Akerman, and Amy Sillman among many others. Schmuckli began her career in New York as a Curatorial Assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and an Assistant Curator at the Museum of Modern Art. She holds a Master of Arts degree in art history from the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany.

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