INTERVIEW SERIES: Media Arts, Visual Communication Design, and Technologies INTERVIEWER: Marie Green | INTERVIEWEE: Charlotte Kent

Throughout your career, you have explored the evolving relationship between visual culture, technology, and artistic practice. Looking at today’s rapidly changing landscape, how do you believe digital technologies—and particularly artificial intelligence—are reshaping not only the production of art but also the very ways we perceive, interpret, and experience images?

I think social media’s algorithmic preferences had a significant influence on how people experience images and thus perceive and interpret them. Everything becomes the same size. That similarity makes it difficult to differentiate types of viewing from one post to another. Art gets seen or experienced separate from the context for which it was imagined. A post or
an account will emphasize qualities and features to maximize the algorithmic conditions that enhance the likelihood of viewership. These are just some of the ways that our visual culture has shifted in the last fifteen years. That shift may be why it seems possible to ignore what we just saw and discussed—generally and within academic circles about social media content, filters, algorithms, language bias, moderation, etc.—and skip ahead to more recent developments.

Generative AI has challenged long-standing assumptions about creativity,
originality, and artistic authorship. From your perspective, should AI-generated works be understood as artistic collaborators, sophisticated tools, or something that demands an entirely new conceptual framework within art history?

It’s easy to challenge things like creativity, originality, art, authorship because as soon as one says what one means, new questions arise that require more explanation (e.g., Plato’s Dialogues offer a stellar example of this problem). What people typically mean by “generative AI” can be different from “AI-generated works”.

Within generative AI exist a variety of networks, processes, and creative practices. Not all “AI-generated works” are the same and my greatest concern is that artifacts of different systems are treated as if they were the same (I wrote about common conflations and confusions in this discourse for The Brooklyn Rail in February 2025, to which I added for a contribution to a special issue of the Journal of Art Crime). To lump these together essentializes the technology and doesn’t provide the opportunity to discern what we mean by
“AI” as it appears in various contexts; through inquiry we can recognize differences and ascertain similarities among the things given as “AI”. That investigative process allows us to identify PR hype, technical distinctions, material substrates, histories, people, processess…to learn when use of some particular form of “AI” might be considered a tool or a collaborator
(in passing, I will mention that having been raised attending French schools, I am always slightly taken aback by the embrace of the term “collaborator” in English, since I can’t help but recall its negative association with those who, during France’s WW2 occupation by Nazi forces, supported the regime). What a word means changes according to its linguistic and social context, the person speaking or writing, the culture(s)…

Visual culture has always reflected broader social, political, and technological
transformations. In an era dominated by algorithms, synthetic media, and computational images, what new visual literacies do you believe contemporary societies must develop?

The advent of psychology encouraged broad self-awareness and that is a necessary criticality for contemporary visual culture, which is plentiful, rapid, changing, mundane and startling, perverse and hegemonic. What do you see? Why do you choose to view some things and not others? What conditions make it possible to see what you see? On social media, what data extrapolated about you promotes certain types of content, at certain times of day or year, and how does it relate to other content? What frame have you been given and what made it acceptable or desirable? What frameworks have you rejected, and why? What gains or losses occur from this perspective, versus that one? Eventually that leads to needing to research, learn, or find something—a culture, a place, a time period, an idea, a person, a material…

Your work often bridges academic research with artistic practice and cultural
criticism. How can interdisciplinary dialogue between artists, scholars, technologists, and philosophers help us better understand the ethical and cultural implications of artificial intelligence in the arts?

The discourse of art is interdisciplinary and always has been. As a scholar and a critic, I have always had to read texts on mathematics, history, philosophy, religion, music, various sciences…that has been true when studying art of any period. Artists that I know well enough to have discussions about their readings and reflections likewise share a capacious and voracious interest in the world—past, present, future as it is understood, described, debated in different fields. I’m not sure how or why art would abandon that kind of diverse thinking now.

Your scholarship frequently engages with the philosophical dimensions of art. As artificial intelligence becomes capable of producing increasingly sophisticated visual works, how should we rethink concepts such as imagination, aesthetic judgment, authenticity, and human creativity?

Richard Kearney’s 1988 book The Wake of the Imagination provides a fascinating overview of how the notion of the imagination developed from Hebraic and Greco-Roman antiquity to the end of the 20 th century and the rise of the postmodern. The expectations for aesthetic judgment have also changed over time. Creativity is a relatively recent term, posited by Alfred Whitehead in a particular context. The concepts raised by the question are themselves delineating a picture of contemporary culture (culture, in the broadest Raymond Williams sense). What happens if we ask other questions? Why the focus on change? What will stay the same? But even allowing for change, what if we ask about other things: Will the concept of craft change? Or medium, audience, or perhaps even concept itself? Is sophisticated an
emerging aesthetic value and what do we mean by it? How might the way we describe things change? My point with this avalanche merely to remind us that the questions we ask determine the answers we seek.