Artist statement - AI ART and Meaning
AI ART and Meaning What role does an artist play when employing AI? Artist statement by JJFBbennett If we accept that AI can generate vast quantities of statistically “meaningful” content from data and algorithms, then meaningful art may lie not in the output itself, but in its selection and framing. AI functions as a kind of unconscious, producing raw material at scale. The artist’s role shifts from maker to curator: deciding what to extract from the data’s noise, what to present as art, the context in which it appears, and the conversation it enters. The artist as the muddler and meddler in the centre of it all. This shift has an art-historical precedent. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp’s *Fountain* made a decisive claim: the artist had not sculpted the urinal but selected it, titled it, and placed it in a gallery. Meaning arose from the gesture of choice rather than the act of making. Walter Benjamin, too, anticipated this logic in his reflections on montage and editing: meaning can e...
