Description of event:

This event features two talks by emerging researchers examines generative AI and its relationship to archives and their gaps. Grace Han will introduce her the “generative archive,” which points out the ways in which artists use generative media (CGI and AI) to “fill in the gaps” of their archives. Then Aurélie Petit will discuss her use of generative AI to create a speculative visual index that interrogates the limits and potentials of Generative AI to restore, build, recover lost feminist media. Q&A to follow.

 

Abstracts:

Grace Han: This talk introduces my theory of the “generative archive,” which points out the ways in which artists use generative media (CGI and AI) to “fill in the gaps” of their archives. This talk will begin with a technical explanation of how generative AI derives form from processually generated noise, rather than the indexically recorded trace. Then, through process phenomenology, this talk will explore the relation between generative media, time, and memory. 

To ground this discussion, I draw upon a case-study of the computer- and AI-generative feminist archives of Korea-born, San Francisco-based artist, Heesoo Kwon. Kwon inserts CG- and AI-generated renders of her female ancestors to queer her otherwise patrilineal genealogical record. Overall, through this analysis of the generative archive, I respond to the timely question now intensified with the highly-visible digital crisis of fake news, DeepFakes, AI-generative video, and more: How do computers shape, cut, and fit into what we know?

Aurélie Petit: Made in the late 1960s during her studies at Bristol University (UK), Black Pudding is one the oldest known animated representations of sexual imagery by a woman. Although at the time of its release, many adult-oriented animated films were produced across Europe, many of them are now considered lost. Likewise, Black Pudding is considered a lost media as copies of the film are no longer available. The purpose of Black Pudding: A Speculative Visual Index is to create a platform that 1) highlights the existence of Black Pudding as a foundational feminist animated media, 2) makes accessible resources and literature about the film, and 3) creates a speculative visual index to interrogate the limits and potentials of Generative AI to restore, build, recover lost feminist media.

 

Bios:

Grace Han (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Stanford University, where she thinks about digital animation aesthetics and its transmedial entanglements. She has previously written on AI, animation, and digital cinema of US, Japan, and South Korea for publications like Animation Studies, Transnational Screens, Handbuch Medientheorien im 21. Jahrhundert (Springer Nature), and has been quoted in Mubi Notebook and BBC Culture. Beyond academia, she has also published and edited popular film writing as a Rotten Tomatoes-certified film critic. She likes to read comics and garden (that is, touch grass) in her free time.

Aurélie Petit is a PhD Candidate in the Film Studies department at Concordia University, Montréal. In her doctoral work Of Tentacles and Men: How anime shaped the internet as we know it, she theorizes the role that Japanese animation culture played in shaping exclusionary practices on the alternative web. Her research examines the intersection of technology and animation, with a focus on gender and sexuality. She is currently the Guest Editor for the Porn Studies journal Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence, Pornography, and Sex Work (forthcoming). She is currently a PhD intern for the Canada Research Chair in Digital Regulation at Work and in Life (Université du Québec à Montréal), researching the representation of fictionalized AI technologies in pornography. Last year, she was a Doctoral Fellow in AI and Inclusion at the AI + Society Initiative (University of Ottawa) researching the ethics of moderating AI pornography. And the Summer 2023, she was a PhD intern in Sociotechnical Systems at the Social Media Collective (Microsoft Research New England), working with Tarleton Gillespie on the limits of automated moderation for pornographic animation involving fictional children.