Dominique Routhier - Art and Automation: Cybernetics, Modernism and the Avantgarde

DIAS Lecture by Dominique Routhier, postdoc in the Department of Language and Culture

Art and Automation: Cybernetics, Modernism and the Avantgarde

Abstract: In a 2022 New York Times article, an artist who won a local art competition with an AI-generated artwork dramatically declared: ‘Art is dead, dude. It's over. AI won. Humans lost.’ This statement exemplifies a broader sense of anxiety about AI and automation, extending beyond concerns about jobs and livelihoods to encompass fundamental aspects of the human condition: our ability to think, reason, communicate, and express ourselves artistically. In a DIAS lecture presenting his new book, With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation, Dominique Routhier historicizes the automation-debate by returning to its ‘cybernetic’ origins in the 1950s. The lecture thus focuses on the centrality of cybernetics—a largely forgotten interdisciplinary ‘science of communication and control’—to the postwar moment in art, and, by way of examples from mid-century modernism and the avantgarde, argues that the history of automation and the history of art are deeply intertwined.

About: Dominique Routhier is a postdoc in the Department of Language and Culture at the University of Southern Denmark, an affiliate at DIAS (Danish Institute for Advanced Studies), and part of the research project ‘Drone Imaginaries and Communities’ (Independent Research Fund Denmark, 2020-2024). His research focuses on the cultural history of automation, with a particular interest in the intersection of art, technology, and political economy. Dominique is currently at work on a scholarly handbook, The Aesthetics of Machine Vision: Critical Terms and Ideas (in review, MIT Press). His writings have appeared in numerous Scandinavian and international journals, including K&K, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Rethinking Marxism, Boundary 2, Historical Materialism, and LARB, among other places. Author of With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation (Verso Books, 2023).

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