Assignment 04: But Is It (Good or Legal) Art?
Overview
Develop a critical creative response or discursive artifact addressing an urgent contemporary question surrounding AI, art-making, authorship, dataset extraction, copyright, consent, labor, or synthetic realism. The project should stage the controversy through artistic form rather than merely illustrating it.
Objectives
- Critical Positioning: Formulate a clear theoretical position grounded in relevant legal, philosophical, or art-historical literature.
- Form-Concept Integration: Ensure the aesthetic form of the piece embodies its critical argument (e.g., dataset poisoning, adversarial watermarking, forensic provenance maps, synthetic persona performance).
- Provenance & Algorethics Disclosure: Provide comprehensive provenance documentation for all datasets, model weights, and media used, reflecting principles of algorethics and transparent disclosure.
- Engagement with Visual Truth & Synthetic Culture: Critically examine the erosion of photographic indexicality (e.g., the ‘Balenciaga Pope’ phenomenon).
Deliverables
- Creative Work / Intervention: Visual, sonic, spatial, interactive, or text-based artifact.
- Critical Essay & Provenance Report (750–1,000 words): Theoretical argument citing at least 3 relevant sources from the course bibliography, accompanied by full dataset/model disclosures.
- Studio Critique Presentation: 5-minute presentation and peer critique discussion in Week 10.