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Reading diary: Ethics

Writer's picture: Greg LockGreg Lock

Biernoff article: Medical Archives and Digital Culture.

By the end of this I was thinking about the advent of AI technology. Machine learning image generation is based on what's happened before so, although it does a great job of generating imagery that is unique and doesn't actually exist up until the point is generated, it does rely on historical data such as that provided by the database that's mentioned in this article. Even though the AI is new and unique (and what arises from the question of its authorship? ) The ethical scenario: In the case of machine learning do the artifacts belong to the software authors, or those who contribute to the database (everyone)?

It was interesting to read how the BioShock video game authors and architects kind of dismissed the copyright issue in an offhand manner which made me think that perhaps the time for being able to rely on copyright law for protection has largely passed.

I was really interested in the extract from Sontag for my own practice: how photographs could, simultaneously, make an event more real than if one had never seen the photograph; But also - through repeated exposure - less real.


The Politics of the Body in Pain: DAUPHINEE

It was difficult to read this essay without conjuring up all the images of the Abu Ghraib torture that pretty much everyone saw. Even though those images broke over 15 years ago they are completely impossible to forget. Even this summer at the Berlin Biennale an artist created a huge maze installation covered with these images; from the famous picture of the man with electrodes on his fingers in a black hood to the guards smiling in front of a pile of bodies. I feel those images were more political than about the pain of torture maybe it was the fidelity of the images or how they were viewed, that perhaps I didn't allow myself to fully empathize with the situation. What does get me to respond viscerally regarding the transference of pain to the viewer, are those funny tick tock videos of idiotic drunk people falling off roofs or crashing their bicycles. I wince in pain and feel the terror of the moment as I quickly try and pause the video before I see the moment. It'd be interesting to see an updated version of this article that included widely disseminated video. The most compelling sentence in the article for me was in the first paragraph where the author states, " beyond the obvious claim that an image can never unproblematically represent the complexity of a lived reality".


I didn't interview myself: the researcher as participant in the narrative research.: Maggie Kirkman

... I didn't vibe with this reading


The ethical claims of bio-art: killing the other or self cannibalism

This was an interesting text that reminded me of several bio art projects that went on in the 90s such as growing your own foreskin kit and other works by Kac and Stellarc. It was all the rage. Although funnily, I don't remember much talk around ethics although there was a kind of furor that grew around this type of work as it was deemed as being super radical and maybe a sign of the future. This text provided further fascinating examples like that of the butterfly and the famous ear piece. I didn't really want to deal with thinking about the ethics around bio art. Part of me just wants to let people get on with it; maybe being a farmer I have a slightly different relationship to how things grow over time. I thought about cultural differences and I wondered what people who visited Documenta 15 and those who form collaborative groups throughout the Global South would think about Bioart. I'm sure that diverse cultural references would encourage conversation not controlled by western believes and notions of Christian piety. How different would ceremonies of killing-off artworks at the end of an exhibition be treated by different ethnic communities? What would agricultural communities who deal with harvest and slaughter and who work with the land to provide for humans, think when faced with production methods having a different goal - a goal with no use (art)?. It's a pretty deep subject.


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GREG LOCK is a visual artist working in sculpture, photography and digital media. All images are copyrighted. If you wish to use any images please contact Greg here: EMAIL

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