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Arts & Communication Computer vision in tactical AI art

and are more detectable as a discursive matter, particularly procedural skills with motivational sincerity and ideational
in art academic circles, than by the outcomes of social or cogency. This ethos of balanced competencies requires
political actions in their wake. cultivation through experimental freedom, playfulness,

Hence, tactical AI art’s conceptual models, underlying conceptually strong hacking, and imaginative discovery.
motivations, and sociotechnical realities coexist in a Artists can leverage epistemic humility to develop more
contradiction whose ethical aspects deserve more scrutiny. rigorous criteria for creative thinking and acquire wider
This dissonance provides ground for an argument that knowledge of the historical, theoretical, cultural, and
artists may be concerned with criticality more because political contexts in which they produce and present their
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they were taught that being critical is good than because works. Developing this rigorous approach will help them
of their experientially informed need to address specific address potentially adverse expressive circumstances and
sociopolitical concerns. The result is artmaking in which clear the way for strong ideas in devising novel ways to
criticality figures more as a floating rhetoric than as harness the physiological and intuitive power of intersecting
a device for political action. It perhaps also explains humans with machine vision. The consequentiality of CV
why artists who work with AI still seldomly address the and AI technologies obliges artists not just to exploit them
implicit complacency toward AI power regimens that as expressive means but to recognize, deconstruct, and
AI art shares with its audience. On the other hand, the explore the injustices in the notional, relational, economic,
shrewdness of many critical artworks indicates that the and other layers of their application. By combining
tactical dissonance does not persist due to the lack of sincerity in assessing the sociotechnical conditions of their
artists’ creative wit but probably due to a combination of everyday and creative lives with a deeper understanding
the conceptual underpinnings of media art activism, the of AI issues and stakeholders, artists can overcome the
contemporary crisis of political opinion, and the deficit of (implicit) cynicism or unconscious resignation that
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political ideas in developed post-industrial democracies. undermines their criticality.
However, even if tactical art’s contributive scope remains To counter the recuperative pull of the corporate AI
constrained to mediating the discomforting symptoms of sector, art market, and academia, artists should strive
modern society and occasionally inciting their remedies, for integrity by identifying and correcting the systemic
it can be improved. value issues in these domains. Artists’ proverbial
inclination toward opportunism calls for decidedly
3.2. Prospects independent professional strategies and sophisticated
The versatility and ubiquity of digital computing and AI, interventions that demask and evade the lures of
as one of its flourishing application domains, are structural commodification and complacency. These strategies
means for power concentration and administrative control. require viewing art and technology as dispositives
Such governing instruments should be chiefly in the hands within anthropological and sociocultural perspectives
of the citizenry, encompassing majorities and minorities, and recognizing (and remembering) that creativity is
communities, and individuals. Thus, critical AI art needs driven by competitive ambitions and is thus inherently
to question whether and how the forms, functions, and instrumentalizable. This recognition informs the ability to
availability of the computational/AI infrastructure can resist prioritizing career building over artmaking, pursue
be brought under transparent and humane democratic external support with skepticism toward institutional
control. By identifying, acknowledging, and understanding rationales for art sponsorship, and be open to taking
the field’s issues outlined above, artists can find new ways genuine risks by evolving potentially hazardous ideas.
not just to pose such questions but also to take part in The political nature of AI technologies largely
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answering them. The import of human vision puts artists remains concealed behind the big business glamorization
who critique its computational emulations in a good of their successes. To reveal it, critical artworks can go
position to anticipate, articulate, and foster changes that beyond rhetorical questions to disclose who makes the
lead to more just and wiser governing of AI’s sociopolitical decisions about AI’s application domains and optimization
and economic regimens. These improvements would goals, who benefits from them, and how. Their impact can
benefit all areas of AI art and its superset computational be improved by bolder probing and deeper problematizing
art in establishing a more poetically cogent, socially modern AI’s underlining concepts such as intelligence,
responsible, and politically effective stratum. creativity, expressive agency, authorship, intellectual labor,
To challenge or tangibly affect AI power and mobilize ownership, authenticity, accuracy, and fairness. The
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the audience with a lasting impact, artists need to maintain flexibility and mutability of these concepts are inherent to
a sharp outlook on their poetic devices and balance sociocultural dynamics, and technologies such as CV can

Volume 2 Issue 3 (2024) 13 doi: 10.36922/ac.2282