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Digital and Sustainability Transitions in Society

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Parasitical Resistance and Pluriversalism: How artistic practice disrupts and reclaims AI – Public talk on 6 October

Photo of Jasmin Pfefferkorn

How do artists engage with AI as geopolitical phenomenon? How do they utilise machine learning to address localised issues? The talk will shed light into these questions and beyond.

  • Time: Tuesday 6 October at 16:00
  • Place: Päätalo A191f Stoori, Kalevantie 4, Tampere University centre campus
  • Speaker: Jasmin Pfefferkorn, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

This presentation offers an account of technological reclamation and human agency by tracing connections made by artists between the wider geopolitical context and the local context. To do so, it takes a focus on artistic strategies in response to AI at two different, yet intersecting, scales.

The first scale highlights the ways in which artists engage with AI as a geo-political phenomenon. This often occurs via the creative misuse and critical interrogation of AI, making visible the systems of dominance and exploitation that unfold alongside the technology. Aligned with the adversarial AI practice of ‘parasitical resistance’, it is a way in which artists attempt to navigate making ethical art with unethical technologies. Further, this approach highlights how artists creatively misuse the commercial AI tools that are nominally designed to support creative practice – showing how hegemonic affordances of the tools’ architectural and algorithmic parameters delimits creativity.

The second scale explores how artists utilise emergent machine learning technologies to engage with more localised environments and issues. This takes a situated approach, with a primary point of focus on artistic works that engage in regions of east and southeast Asia and Oceania. It contends that artists working with and in response to AI and ML assert crucial pluriversal perspectives – perspectives that run counter to the dominant, universalising narrative of Big Tech globalisation.

Speaker bio

Jasmin Pfefferkorn is a Melbourne Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne. She is currently researching the impact of generative technologies on museums’ practice. Her research is at the intersection of museum studies, critical AI, aesthetics, visual culture, and media theory. Jasmin is on the steering committee for the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics’ Art, AI and Digital Ethics research collective, and is the co-founder and director of the research group CODED AESTHETICS. Jasmin is the author of the monograph Museums as Assemblage (Routledge, 2023), and co-editor of the special issue of Media Theory ‘Seeing Photographically’ (2024) as well as the volume Decentring Ethics: AI Art as Method (Open Humanities Press, 2025). 

 

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The talk is organised by Taru – Tampere University Research Centre for Communication Sciences and Visual Studies Lab in collaboration with DigiSus.