Curating Superintelligences x Decentring Ethics

We are pleased to announce the publication of two new open access books in the DATA browser series published by Open Humanities Press.

Curating Superintelligences: A Reader on AI and Future Curating (volume ten)
Curating Superintelligences examines how computational technologies, rapid developments in AI, and the reassertion of subaltern knowledges are reshaping the contemporary curatorial field. It poses questions about the implications of these “super-intelligences” for contemporary art and culture, and the new possibilities for curatorial practice and its future forms. The book situates curating in the context of broader discussions, from literary to computer science perspectives, and the histories of computational curating, those known and less known, to the pervasiveness of the term “curating”. Against this backdrop, the book addresses topics including the convergence of AI and creative practices, new institutional infrastructures and economic models, emerging research areas and methods, and alternative curatorial forms. It asks: what can the practice of curating learn from AI, what can AI learn from curating, and how can both unlearn knowledges derived from undemocratic, centralised and colonialist frameworks of humans and machines? What kind of future infrastructures and curatorial practices can develop from the coming together of diverse human and non-human entities? What new understandings, relationships, and new entities can emerge once open to the possibilities afforded by expanded human and machine epistemologies? 

The book is part reader and part new commissions, edited by Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, with essays, artistic and curatorial projects, case studies and research reports by Dominik Bönisch, CROSSLUCID, Marialaura Ghidini, Olga Goriunova, Francis Hunger, Leonardo Impett, Victoria Ivanova, Eva Jäger, Nathan Jones, Murad Khan, Nora N. Khan, Joasia Krysa, Jason Edward Lewis (Kanaka Maoli/Samoan), Mikhel Proulx, Nicolas Malevé, Gabriel Menotti, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, Alasdair Milne, Christiane Paul, Helen V. Pritchard, Tom Schofield, Skawennati (Kanien’kehá:ka), Sam Skinner, Katrina Sluis, Winnie Soon, Gaia Tedone, Suzanne Treister, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Elvia Vasconcelos, Ashley Lee Wong, Mi You, Martin Zeilinger, Gary Zhexi Zhang.

Decentring Ethics: AI Art as Method (volume nine)
Artists and cultural institutions are a vital force in the construction of a relational, collectively held ethics of human-machine assemblages. Technological change always out-paces ethical governance, producing an uncertain zone between what machines can do, and what is upheld as ethical by diverse publics. Working in ways that are often speculative and provocative, artists trace ethical tensions as they are emerging in public consciousness. Working in the gaps left unfilled by recent developments in national and international policy, it explores artists’ and curators’ radical visions for who or what requires ethical protection. The book pushes past regulatory obligations and towards ethics as a way of being in the world. It advances a decentred approach to ethics. It draws on non-Western, ecocritical and feminist worldviews, and acknowledges the more-than-human as an agent with the capacity to act.

The book contains commissioned essays, in conversation pieces and artistic interventions, edited by Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn and Emilie K Sunde, with contributions by Dani Admiss, Aarati Akkapeddi, Pita Arreola-Burns, Nora Al-Badri, Vanessa Bartlett, Elliott Burns, Gabby Bush, Sean Cubitt, Xanthe Dobbie, Solange Glasser, Beverley Hood, Libby Heaney, Ryan Kelly, Helen Knowles, Ben Loveridge, Margaret Osborne, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Iyad Rahwan, Kamya Ramachandran, Lucy Sparrow, Emilie K. Sunde, Tyne Daile Sumner, and Amanda Wasielewski. 

The DATA browser book series explores new thinking and practice at the intersection of contemporary art, digital culture, and politics. The series is founded and edited by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa, the book template designed by Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey using Multi by David Reinfurt, with additional design and typesetting by Mark Simmonds. All books are released as open access, available for free as PDF and for purchase worldwide through most online bookstores. 

Previous books in the DATA browser series include: Volumetric Regimes: material cultures of quantified presence, edited by Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha & Femke Snelting) (2022); Fabricating Publics: the dissemination of culture in the post-truth era, edited by Bill Balaskas & Carolina Rito (2021), Executing Practices, edited by Helen Pritchard, Eric Snodgrass & Magda Tyżlik-Carver (2018).

The series is supported by Liverpool John Moores University's Exhibition Research Lab and London South Bank University's Digital x Data Research Centre. Additional support from Aarhus University (volume ten) and University of Melbourne (volume nine).

More details, and to download free PDF or order a printed copy: here and here.