Data Dreams: Art and AI maps the collision between artificial intelligence and contemporary art practice through the work of ten international artists, situating the MCA Australia as the first major Australian institution to stage an exhibition of this kind.
About This Book
Published to accompany a landmark exhibition at MCA Australia, Data Dreams: Art and AI asks what happens when AI becomes not merely a tool but a subject, collaborator, and imaginative force within artistic practice. The ten artists gathered here — working across installation, video, sculpture, and research-based practice — refuse easy answers about technology's neutrality. From Lynn Hershman Leeson's decades-long interrogation of identity and machine to Hito Steyerl's analysis of AI's political economies, this catalogue situates contemporary AI art within broader questions of power, bias, and cultural imagination. An illustrated timeline of artificial intelligence history and a glossary of AI terms make this an accessible yet uncompromising reference for practitioners and researchers alike.
Key Features
- 206 pages of artist documentation, critical essays, illustrated AI history timeline, and glossary of AI terms
- Contributions from K Allado-McDowell, Nick Croggon, Trevor Paglen, and Hito Steyerl
- Artists include Angie Abdilla, Fabien Giraud, Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Agnieszka Kurant, Trevor Paglen, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Hito Steyerl, and Anicka Yi
- Published by Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
What You'll Discover
- How ten international artists interpret AI not as spectacle but as a site of cultural, political, and ethical negotiation
- Critical perspectives on artificial intelligence's relationship to surveillance, labour, and systemic bias, drawn from artists with distinct geographical and disciplinary positions
- A contextualising history of AI through an illustrated timeline that grounds the exhibition's contemporary concerns in longer technological trajectories
- The curatorial framework behind the first AI-focused exhibition of its scale staged by a major Australian institution, with critical essays that extend well beyond catalogue convention
About the Author
This volume is edited by Anna Davis, Jane Devery, Tim Riley Walsh, and John Saxby, all of whom are connected to the curatorial and research programme at MCA Australia. Their combined contributions shape the critical apparatus surrounding the exhibition's ten featured artists.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 206
- Dimensions: 21 × 27 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781925806182
- Publisher: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Contemporary art researchers, digital culture critics, design practitioners engaging with AI, and anyone tracking the intersection of technology and artistic production in an Australian and global context.