Event Reflection: Beth Coleman

by Oğuz Kayır

In a world convoluted with digital practices across all cultural registers, where does AI stand to unravel the intricacies of the human condition? How does it enable, dictate, or foreclose the emergence of kinships across the different ontological orders of humans, animals, and machines? When does it become a generative force in grasping the relational affiliations between race, cognition, and computation? These are the inquiries that Beth Coleman’s AI-generated artistic venture provokes. In Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds, Coleman draws inspiration from Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction trilogy Xenogenesis in which survival through interspecies bonding becomes a meditative motion. Thinking through these kinships, Coleman’s talk thereby ponders whether AI can be wild, rather than contained, to gesture towards a radical possibility of technology that overcomes the pitfalls of image production.

While these generative potentials of AI are indicative of a more equitable future, for Coleman, the stakes at which they operate rely on a twofold veneer. In her talk, she makes a call towards an ethics in AI design to foreground accountability to the surface and asks whether Butler’s “alien encounters” can afford provocative results in contemporary AI-driven art practice to imagine a state of ontological ambiguity; a generative state released from the regime of stasis and sameness towards the interspecies kinships whereby the wild, the uncontained, the libidinal reign. Though these generative potentials may appear abstract at the outset, they are rendered discernible in Coleman’s art practice that accompanies the talk. From the otherworldly figures of Black people to granular textures of oceanic creatures, OBAI creates a constellation of images that reconsiders the link between race, kinship, and computational practices. At once disorienting and captivating, Coleman’s AI-generated images thus invoke that liberatory wildness, revealing the libidinal economy that occurs at the sutures of modern technology and the contemporary black experience.