In 2023 OpenAI launched ChatGPT-4 as a range of new, highly sophisticated AI technologies flooded the data-sphere. The new apps allow for complex image and video generation, text generation and code writing, which are rapidly becoming a new, non-human labour force instructed to perform novel tasks that edge us ever closer to artificial general intelligence. These AI interfaces have led to widespread debate, consternation and have reignited conversations around authorship, labour, technology, desire, value, surveillance, and education.

For this issue of Art + Australia, we welcome proposals that engage with the overarching theme of "The Mirror", an object and symbol of reflection, self-examination, and representation. Is AI technology simply a democratising mirror as Tim O’Reilly discusses? Does AI, as Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues, further disassemble and augment desire? Does it have the potential to eschew or reconfigure our current labour practices? What does art tell us about AI’s uses, fallibility, and bias? What futures are artists imagining with AI? Is AI yet another techno-bureaucracy accelerating the global feedback of contemporaneity?

Some potential topics to be considered include:

— Transhumanist explorations in AI-engaged art, human-tech collaborations that explore identity, embodiment, memory and consciousness
— Histories of artistic resistance, response, and adoption of new technology
— The cross-disciplinary potential of AI for artists, ecologists, language preservation projects and agricultural practices
— Articles and discussions that highlight contemporary artists from the Asia Pacific employing AI in generative art, algorithmic art, or machine learning-based art
— The impact of AI on art institutions, labour and the art market  
— Artworks by artists in video, code, image, audio or creative articles that are discursively or materially engaged with AI technologies
— Definitions and understandings of ‘creativity' and ‘authorship' in relation to AI autonomous agents and generative systems
— Examination of the datasets and algorithms driving AI, and implications for artistic expression, cultural hegemony and its relation to an Asia Pacific context
— Considerations of processes that can generate a more equitable and diverse technological environment with or through AI, in art making and scholarship

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Please send a single pdf to info@artandaustralia.com, which includes the following:

— Up to 200 word outline of proposed submission
— Preferred format: article, conversation (recorded or transcribed), video work, coded web applet etc.
— Up to five images with captions (if relevant)
— A one-page CV (or link to CV online)
— Links to previous writing, social media, website or projects

INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS

Key Dates

— Proposals Due: 10 June 2023
— Initial Drafts Due: 10 July 2023
— Publication Launch : Sep 2023

Fees

— Art + Australia provides an 80c p/word fee for articles published on Art + Australia
— A fee a equivalent will be determined on a case-by-case basis for all creative or experimental submissions

Contact

For all queries and proposals submissions please contact Art + Australia's Managing Editor Jeremy Eaton at info@artandaustralia.com