Humane Conversation: Art & AI
On July 1, 2025, we kicked off the first Humane Conversation of this season, on the topic of Art & AI. It was the warmest day of the year so far, but we were generously hosted in the comfortable and air-conditioned location of the Sweelinck room by the Institute of Advanced Study in the centre of Amsterdam.
With us in the conversation we had Julia Janssen, artist and data management ambassador; Zachary Formwalt, artist and researcher at the Rietveld Academie/Sandberg Instituut; and Annemiek Mi-Jin de Groote and Nanna Kassenaar from the collective AICON dedicated to the exploration of the social-beneficial potential and challenges of AI.
Principal Investigator of the RPA Human(e) AI Natali Helberger opened the conversation by introducing the second period of the RPA and spoke briefly of our plans in the coming semester.
The conversation was structured into short presentations by each of the participants, before they joined the panel discussion moderated by Human(e) AI postdoctoral researcher Zilin Lin.
Janssen presented her artistic work that involves privacy policies and cookie consent, personal data and recommendation algorithms. For example, in an installation introduced at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023, Janssen collected Netflix data from herself, her father and her grandmother to reflect on the way recommendation algorithms give us choices and what this means for our decision making.
Formwalt showed us his work on the meatpacking industry, and explained how gelatine, a biproduct of meat, is used in photography. In his work, he makes a connection between the consumption of meat products and the AI models’ consumption of images in the process of image generation.
De Groote and Kassenaar from AICON told us about how AICON started with one artwork that developed into a larger movement of artists, researchers and citizens. Through their projects, AICON aims to explore what AI means for society. In one of their projects, they engaged scientists in the AlgoSoc International Conference to make embroideries of their feelings about AI.
Many interesting topics were brought up during the panel discussion. These are some of the themes that were discussed and points that were made by the panellists:
- Through art, one can make invisible things visible, and this is especially important in demystifying AI technology.
- Does the usage of AI technology make us lose important cognitive tasks, such as understanding written texts without help to summarize?
- AI is good at recognizing patterns, but not necessarily creation.
- AI magnifies the existing problems rooted in our society.
- There is a process of using generative AI, where we are both consuming and producing content simultaneously.
- Using AI technology to make things more efficient is just reorganizing labour, and we should understand AI as an industrial technology which is part of a longer history of industrialization.
- Generative AI is not creativity; it is too polished. Where is the ugliness?
All in all, we had an interesting and fruitful session, which truly shows how much there is still to understand and reason about in the intersection of AI, art, and research. We are looking forward to continuing to talk about AI in the future Humane Conversations in the fall.
[A recording of the event will be made available shortly – stay tuned!]
About the guest speakers:
- Julia Janssen, artist, speaker, and ambassador for data protection: Julia Janssen
Julia Janssen is an artist, speaker, and ambassador for data protection. She explores the influence of data, AI, and technology on our physical environment and creates interactive and performative installations to provide her audience with insight into the challenges of our digitizing world.
- Zachary Formwalt, artist, filmmaker and researcher at the Sandberg Instituut/Rietveld Academie: Zachary Formwalt
Zachary Formwalt is an artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. Exploring relations between media technologies and economic processes, with a particular focus on the aesthetic circumstances of capital accumulation, his work takes the form of films, installations, publications, writings and exhibitions. He is a member of the Algorithmic Cultures Research Group at the Sandberg Institute and teaches theory in the Graphic Design Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. His work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade; EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; VOX Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal; Serralves Museum, Porto; Casco Art Institute, Utrecht; Wexner Center for the Arts; Kunsthalle Basel and elsewhere. His essays have appeared in various journals including Grey Room, Open, kunstlicht, and Metropolis M.
- Annemiek Mi-Jin de Groote and Nanna Kassenaar members of the AICON movement for exploration of the social-beneficial potential and challenges of AI: AICON
The ‘radicareful’ AICON movement connects citizens, artists, and researchers in an exploration of the social-beneficial potential and challenges of AI. This collaborative project focuses on empowering communities, allowing citizens to discover what defines their environment and how they engage with the world. AICON is about co-creation of concepts that do not fit within those traditional demarcated frameworks. We hope that this will ultimately contribute to the democratization of AI, making AI understandable and accessible to all. Moreover, AICON encourages all social stakeholders to be open to a different way of working together and to explore how we want to organize our society together and what values we value.