Lecture | China Seminar
Enhancing Human creativity and innovation with the Integration of Digital and AI Partners into the Contemporary Art Sector: Exploring China as a Case Study
- Date
- Wednesday 11 September 2024
- Time
- Series
- LIAS China Seminar
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- Lipsius 1.48
Abstract
The pace and widespread integration of digital technologies and AI into the contemporary art sector is distinct to China today due to its rapid digital developments and government policies on integration of digital technology and art and promotion of AI for individuals and organisations. This has taken place in many industry sectors as a result of government policy on national cultural development to create a ‘digital China’. These national policy directions have led to increased and widespread adoption of digital and AI artistic creation processes. However, little is known about artists’ adoption of digital and AI technologies and resultant digital creation processes, including when these artists adopted digital technologies and AI in their creative practices, how they use them, how they see their relationships with them in creating art, and the affordances they see in ‘them’ for speed, accuracy, innovation, creativity. Finding out and sharing such positives of the integration of technologies can help to show a potential sustainable balance between human creativity and control vis-à-vis use of non-humans for enhancing our speed and accuracy.
This research draws on 30 interviews with contemporary Chinese visual artists (b. 1978-1995), including painters, video artists, multi-media artists, sculptors, new media artists, internet artists, and photographers, 23 interviews with arts professionals in the contemporary art sector, a survey with 110 professional artists from across China, and a systematic review of government policy – carried out between 2023 and 2024.
Biography
Dr. Emma Duester is Associate Professor at the USC-SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Previously, Emma was a Faculty Member in the School of Communication and Design at RMIT University in Vietnam. She is the author of ‘The Politics of Migration and Mobility in the Art World: Transnational Baltic Artistic Practices Across Europe’, published by Intellect in 2021, and the author of ‘Digitization and Culture in Vietnam’, published by Routledge in 2023. Emma received a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2017. Her areas of research interest include technology and culture, digital culture, the culture sector, digitization of cultural heritage, digital technologies, museum and digital environments, transnational communication, migration and mobilities.