Guest Artist & Scholar Lecture Series: Amanda Wasielewski

April 1 | 12:00 p.m. | Zoom

For the museum sector, open-access digitization projects have long been framed in a positive light: fostering democratic access to cultural material. Such projects have faced criticism, however, for digitally disseminating cultural heritage collections without the permission or consultation of the people or cultures who created them. As generative AI tools have risen in prominence, artists and creative professionals have also raised the alarm around the use of art and cultural material in AI training sets, critiquing this unauthorized use of their work. Today, open-access digital collections are more problematic than ever. In light of these developments, the talk explores the practical and theoretical issues inherent in applying AI techniques in the study, curation, and creation of art. How are the biases in Western art compounded through automation? Do the advantages of automating with AI outweigh the potential for bias or do they represent a step backward from the postcolonial critiques of the twentieth century? How can we square a desire for open culture with the web-scraping efforts of corporations training commercial AI models? 

Amanda Wasielewski is Associate Senior Lecturer of Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of ALM (Archives, Libraries, Museums) at Uppsala University in Sweden. Her research focuses on the use of visual artificial intelligence tools to study, order, and create artwork and images. Wasielewski is the author of three monographs, including Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (2023). She is co-editor of the anthology Critical Digital Art History (2024) and author of “Unnatural Images: On AI-Generated Photographs” (Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2024). Her fourth monograph, Digital Photography After AI, is forthcoming in 2026. 

Following the lecture, there will be a discussion moderated by Chelsea Haines, Assistant Professor of Art History & Museum Studies, and Ninabah Winton, independent curator and Museum Professional at the School of Art.

This talk is sponsored by the Visiting Artist and Scholars Lecture Series and the Art History program at the School of Art.

Image: An image produced by DALL-E 2 using the prompt “Moche pottery depicting Queen Victoria.”