Source:: Glitch by Lezet
Value in, garbage out: on Al art and hegemony
Excerpt from Article by R. H. Lossin (link to full text below)
”Hegemony,” wrote Raymond Williams, “is the continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture.” The concept of hegemony was used by Williams as a way to rescue culture from a reductive and one-way formulation of base and superstructure, where the base—Fordist manufacturing for example—is the cause of the superstructure or all things “merely cultural.” Rather, hegemony places literature, paintings, films, dance, television, music, and so on at the center of how a dominant culture rules or how a ruling class dominates. This is not to assert that art is propaganda for capitalism (although sometimes it is). Nor is it to revert to theories of “art for art’s sake” and the normative metaphysics of liberal cultural criticism (Art’s social value is its independence from politics. What about “beauty”? etc.). According to Williams’s theory of hegemony, art is one way of enlisting our desire in the “making and remaking” our own domination. But desire is unstable and, as an important part of maintaining a dominant culture, art is also, potentially, a means of its unmaking.
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Williams argued that “it is a fact about the modes of domination that they select from and consequently exclude the full range of actual and possible human practice.” As datasets continue to increase quantitatively, their fascist exclusions are concealed by the extent of their extraction, but they are no more universal than the universalism of, say, the European Enlightenment. The repetitive, homogenous output of image generators and their non-relation to distinct inputs, even the uneasy intuition that you’ve seen it somewhere already, demonstrates the extent of this exclusion. In a structure that mimics the extractive devastation required to power these screen dreams, the more data it collects the more thoroughly decimated the informational landscape becomes. Rather than the adage “garbage in, garbage out,” favored by computer scientists and statisticians, AI’s transformation of inputs into visual objects is a matter of “value in, garbage out.” Art collection in, garbage out; literature in, garbage out; apples in, garbage out; human subject in, garbage out; Indigenous lifeways in, garbage out.
