Automating Aesthetics
In the original 1950s vision of artificial intelligence, the goal was to teach computers to perform a range of cognitive…
Features
Who Cares if You Listen: The Algorithm at 100
In March 2016 a rare board game event broke into the mainstream media: a computer had beaten a human Go…
Closed Circuits and Echo Chambers
When my own doors shut, I can freely enter whatever world I want. –– Amos Awe-inspiring concrete tower blocks, colossal…
Conceiving Autonomy
Loneliness lives on our net frontier. Even motherboards and Flash require touch. Think of passion each time you click me…
Homebrew Computer
Ever since the Renaissance, the most complex machines that humans have developed have been used as an analogy for the…
When the Painter Learned to Program
The whole of my history in relation to computing really has had to do with a change from the notion…
Age of Hybrids
Since the political upset of the American presidential election, journalists, academics and artists have been working to make sense of…
AI through the Technologist’s Eye
The semi-coherent shapes, blurred colors and disfigured face of Butcher’s Son (2017) misguide many an untrained eye in search of…
Immigration Made Easy
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (commonly referred to as ICE) is the governmental enforcement agency responsible for the detention and…
All Systems Go
In 1997, the world watched with awe and trepidation as IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Russian world chess champion Garry…
Computer Visions
In both popular and art news media, stories of developments in the realm of art and artificial intelligence are typically…
Berlin Stories
On the occasion of the first Berlin Biennale, Flash Art edited a portfolio of texts celebrating Berlin as an…
The Better Biennale
“Aperto ’93,” curated by Flash Art editor Helena Kontova and twelve other critics and curators active with the magazine, was…
Guilty Memory of the Future
We call her “she.” Whether she’s the satnav, the sultry secretary or the leader of the robot uprising, her hologram…
From Pygmalion to Ping Body
In retrospect, we may look upon the long tradition of figure sculpture … as an extended psychic dress rehearsal for…
No Safe Mode
Designers of technology love to propagate the myth of a just world, in which people always get what they deserve.…