Talks & Lectures

The Age of Noise (2024).

Performance lecture for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia. An argument that Artificial Intelligence marks the end of the information age. The information age was about finding data. Now we live in an age where information is abundant - and we build technologies to sort through it on our behalf. What does that mean for those tasked with preserving information?

Glitching AI Systems (2024)

A practical artist’s talk the Pervasive Media Studio at Watershed, Bristol, UK. This talk explores the role of noise in generative AI systems: Noise is required to make these systems work, but too much noise can make them unsteady. We discuss the technical and cultural noise of AI to critique assumptions about "humanity" that have informed the way they operate.

The Pervasive Media Studio is a partnership between the Watershed, University of the West of England and University of Bristol. The lunchtime talks are partly supported by MyWorld, a project led by the University of Bristol to support creative industries in the region. Watershed is supported by Arts Council England.

Creative Misuse of AI (2024)

As part of the Big Ideas in Art and Culture lecture series presented by Musagetes and CAFKA, artist and academic Eryk Salvaggio presented a talk titled “Creative Misuse of A.I.” at the Art Gallery of Guelph. Can you use A.I. to resist A.I.? In the video below, Eryk Salvaggio describes his engagement with A.I. from the perspective of “creative misuse,” pushing A.I. image and sound tools to move beyond often exploitative and incomplete datasets to critique surveillance capitalism. How can artists use and critique technology at the same time? How do we make sense of the messy entanglements between culture, surveillance, and labour at the heart of A.I.?

Screens, Machines & Dreams: AI is Imaginary (2023)

(Skip to 1m43s). Delivered for the Center for Digital Play at the University of Copenhagen in November 2023. (How can video game studies contribute to the field of generative AI? In this presentation, artist, researcher and RIT game design instructor Eryk Salvaggio connects ideas of play, art, interfaces and the imaginary to highlight AI as a cybernetic circuit: a magic circle co-created between the user and the machine. By shifting the lens of generative AI from productivity to play, Salvaggio proposes that we can expand the way we design, interact, and use AI with greater agency and reflexivity. Talk given at the Center for Digital Play (digitalplay.itu.dk), IT University of Copenhagen, in November 2023.

How to Read an AI Image (2023)

Delivered for Aarhus University in 2023. How might we "read" an AI image? What does it mean for these images to be "infographics about the dataset?" In this talk, Eryk Salvaggio links his artistic practice to generated media. Using straightforward, non-technical language to describe how AI diffusion models for images work, Salvaggio walks us through the maxim that "Generative AI is a process of constraining noise toward the central tendencies of assembled data, using bias to steer."

You can read the essay discussed in this lecture here.

Urgent Futures with Jesse Damiani: Chat with Caroline Sinders & Eryk Salvaggio (2024)

What role do artists actually play in society? What about in the development of AI? It’s easy to speak in vague, grandiose terms about the power of art, but when do the actual actions, techniques, and interventions of artists amount to real-world impact? For this conversation, we discuss ARRG!, the Algorithmic Resistance Research Group, which has as its goal to explore the creative misuse of Generative AI, Machine Learning, and other automated data analysis systems.

Algorithmic Futures Podcast: The art of artificial intelligence, with Eryk Salvaggio (2024)

In the age of DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, what counts as art? And what can art tell us about AI? In this episode, we explore these questions and more with the help of Eryk Salvaggio, a US-based artist, designer and researcher whose work explores the fabric of artificial intelligence — and often playfully defies its boundaries. Recorded live at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Nobody is Always Watching You: From Big Brother to Big Data (2021)

Keynote for the New Commons Project, recorded at the University of Memphis in 2021. Addresses the links between Orwell’s “1984” and the regimes of machine learning and algorithmic surveillance.