History of Art and Architecture

What, if Anything, Did Michael Baxandall Have to Say about AI?

Wednesday, October 23, 2024 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm

202 Frick Fine Arts
Alison Langmead
A cynic might describe an art historian as someone who "turns pictures into words." In some respects, this also describes what many computational systems embedded into our social world do to the human experience: they formalize non-verbal behaviors, chock full of ambiguous meanings and implications, and turn them into (computationally-)tractable syntax. What can the practice of art history contribute about this process of turning non-verbal experience into words—if this is a process we accept as our long-standing practice—to the conversation about the judiciousness of embedding computational systems ubiquitously into our daily practices?