Maddening the Machine: Drawing and AI with Professor Michael Newman at the BMO Lab

Building on his earlier engagement with drawing as trace in Derrida and drawing on drawing as disegno and scribble in the Renaissance, Michael Newman will explore the double nature of drawing: as trace of what has passed, associated with memory, and as generativity, associated with the future. An archaeology of drawing made using chance (Jacques Derrida, John Cage) will lead to consideration of its relation to probability and randomisation in AI. Partnerships between human artists and AI, involving bodily gesture and choreography, show that imagination may be conceived not as a faculty of the individual subject, but rather as inhering in relations, leading us to consider AI’s potential for imagination. Artists’ practice with AI generativity may open up radical transformations in the relations between humans and machines. However, returning to the trace will also raise inescapable questions of finitude and ethics. 

Michael Newman is Professor of Art Writing at in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds degrees in English literature and art history, and a PhD in philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He has published numerous essays on modern and contemporary artists as well as thematic essays on the wound, the horizon, contingency, memory, drawing, and nonsense. He is co-director of the new Drawing Centre for Humans and Machines at Goldsmiths University in London, UK.

Directions to the Lab.