Liquidate AI Art
Wednesday, July 23, 2025 at 1:06PM This is the author's cut of my abstract for a talk (online only) I am due to give at the Computer Art Society in London on October 15, 2025.
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Liquidate AI Art
Gary Hall
Liquidate =
to wind up the affairs of an enterprise or business, shut it, close it down, stop it operating, so it’s assets can be sold off to pay its debts
to kill
This talk expands on my recent book Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence. It argues for liquidating AI art, not out of a dismissal of such computational technology as a product of the ‘military-industrial-tech complex’ – however techno-fascist, nihilist or just parrot-like it may appear – but rather an insistence that art has always been created by hybrid assemblages of humans and nonhumans. There is no pure, authentic human creativity to distinguish from works generated with technologies like Stable Diffusion
But ‘Liquidate AI Art’ is also a bold provocation in that it references the International Coalition for the Liquidation of Art – whose members included Gustav Metzger, first editor of the Computer Art Society (CAS) bulletin PAGE – and especially Frieder Nake’s assertion in PAGE 18 that ‘there should be no computer art’. For Nake, art should not be divided into commodifiable styles based on the tools used to produce it. Instead, it should function as a radical force capable of disrupting the power structures of the bourgeois art world.
Picking up on this challenge, ‘Liquidate AI Art’ builds on my forthcoming book Defund Culture to show how funding and support in the UK’s creative industries overwhelmingly benefit upper- and middle-class, privately educated, Oxbridge graduates. Such structural inequality cannot be remedied through social mobility initiatives that include more ‘diverse’ groups in a system that has historically excluded them and was constructed in advance (although not by them). What’s needed is a redistribution of resources – e.g. through the liquidation of the UK’s copyright regime – to support radically different ways of thinking and working beyond the white, male, middle-class, liberal humanist norm.