'Liquidate AI Art': 15 October Talk for Computer Arts Society
Monday, September 22, 2025 at 7:51AM Liquidate AI Art
Speaker: Gary Hall; Moderator: Sean Clark 18:00 BST, Wednesday, 15 October 2025 Other time zones here: https://www.timeanddate.com
This event is via Zoom only. It is open to the public and free but you need to book your place here: https://ComputerArtsSociety151025.eventbrite.co.uk
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 artificial intelligence as techno-fascist (McQuillan), nihilist (Golumbia), parrot-like (Bender et al) synthetic shit (Crawford), but an insistence that art has always been created by assemblages of humans and nonhumans. There is no pure, authentic human creativity to distinguish from works generated with technologies like Stable Diffusion.
The talk references the International Coalition for the Liquidation of Art – whose members included Gustav Metzger, first editor of the 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, but should instead function as a radical force capable of disrupting the hierarchies of the bourgeois art world.
Picking up on this challenge, ‘Liquidate AI Art’ shows how UK arts funding today overwhelmingly benefits upper- and middle-class, privately educated Oxbridge graduates. Efforts to promote inclusion through social mobility risk reinforcing this unjust system. What’s needed is a redistribution of resources – e.g. through the liquidation of the UK’s copyright regime – to support radically different artistic practices beyond the white, male, middle-class, liberal humanist norm.
The event will be recorded and uploaded to the CAS YouTube Channel.
___________________________________
The next CAS meeting will feature a talk by Anika Meier on Wednesday, 19 November 2025, via Zoom.
You can see our future programme here: https://computer-arts-society.com/events/index.html