Leonardo Art, Science and Technology Lecture Series 2017: Automatic Art, Automated Trading

<About the Lecture>

In cultural representations of artificial intelligence and automated trading, the work of Jackson Pollock has emerged as an unlikely inspiration for the technological innovations that have drastically transformed the economy and, by extension, the world. This lecture will investigate further the connection between one of the most abstract and complex domains of finance, automated or “black box” trading, and the abstract expressionism (ab-ex) of what is sometimes characterized as Pollock’s “automatic art”. This will entail branching out into another abstract and complex field, namely artificial intelligence, whose cultural representations have in at least one case–Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina–involved Pollock as well. How is ab-ex mobilized in cultural representations of artificial intelligence and automated trading? How do the differences between those mobilizations render the various abstractions that those phenomena represent more concrete? If Pollock is a rather surprising ally for art’s engagement with artificial intelligence and automated trading, how have other contemporary artists as well as curators engaged with the technological innovations that have shaped today’s financial era and the debilitating market collapses that it has suffered (for example in 2008 and 2010)? In sum, how does art help us think about the technological infrastructure of today’s digitized economy in a time when art has all too often been reduced to a mere commodity or marker of wealth?

Jackson Pollock

Ex Machina, film by Alex Garland