Join us for a Saturday afternoon talk, as part of a series of talks in tandem with the exhibition Ailbhe Ní Bhriain: The Dream Pool Intervals; programmed with curator Sara Muthi.
These weekend, afternoon talks and presentations bring together authors and artists whose work moves between fiction, visual culture, and critical theory, exploring how we make sense of the world through narrative, memory, and the shifting aesthetics of the past and the digital age.
‘The SunDALL.E painters of the Internet’ with Joanna Walsh
Saturday 9 August, 2pm
Since 2023 the craze for AI art has meant that people who’d never picked up a paintbrush could create ‘masterpieces’. ‘Outpainting’ apps extend classic paintings, hallucinating contemporary contexts for the most well-known pieces. But how does AI ‘art’ work? Where does AI ‘get its ideas from’. And why does it matter?
Art “should be easier,” wrote August Kamp, the co-creator (with Vermeer and DALL.E) of the ‘extended’ Girl with a Pearl Earring. “Every single day until everyone is doing it because it is good for people to do”. If AI enables this, how does it square with the ideals of twentieth century radicals who called for “everyday life [to] become a work of art!” (Henri Lefebvre).
Most AI art is ‘bad’ art: ‘inauthentic,’ often kitsch, and bad for the ability of artists to control the use of their works and to earn a living. But it also prompts vital questions about class, taste and access in the arts.
Joanna Walsh a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of twelve books (several co-written with DIY AIs that she coded), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury and Verso. She is the creator of the digital projects, seed-story.com and miss-communication.ie.
Her work has been performed/exhibited at venues including IMMA, the ICA, BETA Festival Dublin, and Sample Studios Cork. She was the 2020 Markievicz Awardee for Literature and a 2017 UK Arts Foundation fellow. In 2024 she turned down an DAAD Artists in Berlin fellowship in solidarity with Palestine. She is currently an MSCA postdoctoral fellow at NUI Maynooth.
Free, book on Eventbrite or come along on the day. Space is limited.
