Guest lecture: Artistic resistance and reclamation in the age of AI
University of Melbourne researcher Jasmin Pfefferkorn examines how artists creatively resist, critique and repurpose AI technologies, exposing the systems of power embedded within them. Focusing on works from East and Southeast Asia and Oceania, her presentation highlights local perspectives that challenge Big Tech’s universalising narratives.
The talk explores artistic responses to AI at two intersecting scales: the geopolitical systems shaping the technology and the local environments in which artists work. It considers how artists deliberately misuse and critically interrogate AI to expose structures of dominance and exploitation, raising questions about how to make ethical art with unethical technologies. These practices also reveal how commercial AI tools can constrain the creativity they promise to support.
Turning to local contexts, the presentation examines how artists use emerging machine learning technologies to engage with specific environments and issues. Their work asserts diverse ways of understanding and making the world, challenging the idea that technological globalisation follows a single, universal path.
Time: Tuesday, October 6th at 16:00.
Place: TAU Päätalo A191f Stoori
Speaker: Melbourne Postdoctoral Research Fellow Jasmin Pfefferkorn, The University of Melbourne
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 sits 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. She is the author of Museums as Assemblage (Routledge, 2023), and co-editor of the Media Theory special issue ‘Seeing Photographically’ (2024) and the volume Decentring Ethics: AI Art as Method (Open Humanities Press, 2025).
The talk is hosted by the DigiSus-funded project “Distributed Vision and Planetary-Scale Perception.” The project is led by associate professor Yanai Toister from Visual Studies Lab, part of Taru – Tampere University Research Centre for Communication Sciences.