Collaging, remixing, sampling—art always has been more than the sum of
its parts, a synthesis of elements and ideas that produces something new
and thought-provoking. Technology has enabled and advanced this
enormously, letting us access and manipulate information and images in
ways that would’ve been unimaginable just a few decades ago.
For Nettrice Gaskins, this is an essential
part of the African American experience: The ability to take whatever
is at hand—from food to clothes to music to visual art—and combine it
with life experience to adapt it into something new and original. She
joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss how she takes this
approach in applying artificial intelligence to her own artwork,
expanding the boundaries of Black artistic thought.
In this episode you’ll learn about:
- Why making art with AI is about much more than just typing a prompt and hitting a button
- How hip-hop music and culture was an early example of technology changing the state of Black art
- Why the concept of fair use in intellectual property law is crucial to the artistic process
- How biases in machine learning training data can affect art
- Why new tools can never replace the mind of a live, experienced artist
Dr. Nettrice R. Gaskins
is a digital artist, academic, cultural critic, and advocate of STEAM
(science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) fields whose work she
explores "techno-vernacular creativity" and Afrofuturism. She teaches,
writes, "fabs,” and makes art using algorithms and machine learning. She
has taught multimedia, visual art, and computer science with high
school students, and now is assistant director of the Lesley STEAM Learning Lab at Lesley University. She was a 2021 Ford Global Fellow,
serves as an advisory board member for the School of Literature, Media,
and Communication at Georgia Tech, and is the author of “Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation”
(2021). She earned a BFA in Computer Graphics with honors from Pratt
Institute in 1992; an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago in 1994; and a doctorate in Digital Media from
Georgia Tech in 2014.