Culture, in a broad sense, is increasingly implicated in processes of automation by computational means. Both professional and amateur cultural producers are testing the waters for the employment of artificial intelligence in new and innovative contexts. The world of music, design, art, filmmaking and literature have all respectively been introduced to the notion of non-human creativity. Simultaneously, computational processes are also increasingly driving cultural consumption and artificial intelligence is used to target and incite audiences to consume individually-tailored cultural products and messages.

Technologies that incorporate artificial intelligence are becoming part of everyday life and mainstream culture and are used to automate and optimize aspects of people’s day-to-day existence. Robots and artificial intelligences walk among us and talk to us at home, at work and in public spaces, something which also inspires an increasing cultural engagement with AI in the form of aesthetic remediations, artistic imaginaries and creative fantasies.

These and related developments make it increasingly urgent to ask what the consequences of artificial intelligence are for culture, but also how we are engaging with AI through cultural practices. AI has emerged as a cultural technique that poses new questions on how the machinic relates to the human and vica versa: How is culture intermingling with computational processes? How is cultural work and production, cultural consumption and the experience of culture, being affected by artificial intelligence? How do we make sense of AI through cultural and aesthetic practices including not only art and culture, but also social imaginaries and fantasies?

These are the driving questions for the symposium Artificial Intelligence // Cultural Technique to be held at Tekniska museet in Stockholm 14 June 2019.