The History of Consciousness department presents “Art and Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Investigation” with Alice Barale, University of Milan as part of the 2024-2025 HistCon Speaker Series.

Join us Monday, October 28 at 1pm PST in Hum 1 Rm 210 or register below to attend virtually:

It has been several years since the first artwork created with artificial intelligence was sold at the renowned auction house Christie’s in 2018. In the meantime, new types of artificial intelligence have emerged, enabling artists to conduct different experiments. However, the presence of AI in the artistic process continues to raise significant questions. How should its role be understood? And, more importantly, what new chances does it offer within the artistic field and beyond?

Alice Barale is a scholar of Aesthetics and Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage at the University of Milan. She has extensively researched Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, authors to whom she has dedicated several essays and two monographs (“La malinconia dell’immagine,” FUP, 2009, and “La prima impresa: Shakespeare in Warburg e Benjamin,” Jaca Book, 2021). For Benjamin, she has edited and translated a new Italian version of “Origin of the German Trauerspiel” (Carocci, 2018). Among her most recent research interests are the philosophy of color (“Il giallo del colore,” Jaca Book, 2020) and the relationship between art and artificial intelligence. She has curated the collected volume “Arte e intelligenza artificiale. Be my GAN” (Jaca Book, 2020) and has just completed a new book on the subject, which will be published in November 2024.

Co-sponsored by Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence & The Humanities Institute.