CT 151Machine Collaboration: Creativity in Posthuman Practice

Introduction to machine intelligence and creativity, contextualized historically and applied to contemporary problems, ranging from commercial “AI,” large language models, opaque and transparent algorithms for representation and creativity, and arts practices vulnerable to exploitation by corporate and state practices of information and data. How should consumers and producers of technology interpret AI production, as art , as design, and as entertainment? Students survey practices and outcomes of machine creativity for cultural production writ large, synthesizing them in collaborative scholarship and curation.

• All Students can enroll - the review of prerequisites and restrictions is waived in summer. If you get an error message, email summer@ucsc.edu for a permission number to enroll.
• From the Instructor: How do we practice seeing through systems? What language do we use for a machine (that is) learning to look at us, or the wake of an algorithm? What can criticism offer when the design of computation disappears makers’ motives? Machine Collaboration: Creativity in Posthuman Practice (a course which also goes by the subtitle Criticism in the Age of AI) explores the craft of developing a hybrid, strategic, collective and dissident criticism of technology. To navigate a future created by predictive systems, our language must move with intelligent systems.
• Through experimental writing efforts, we will practice articulating our often baffling, hard-to-define experiences using, thinking, and living with technologies from early software to quantum computing. Throughout, we will look at technology as a symbolic system that shapes our cognition. We’ll practice slow, analytical thinking to counter the speed, scale, and dizzying imperatives of techno-solutionist production. Students will leave with their own language toolbox: a set of revisable critical methods to identify a vast range of hidden fictions and beliefs about what technology is meant to do and be.

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