Deep Learning: e-book Towards an Automated Art? Learning Machines, Human Creativity And Uncertainty

article

DATE

04 Sep 2026

AUTHOR

Umbigo

Deep Learning: e-book Towards an Automated Art? Learning Machines, Human Creativity And Uncertainty

AUTHOR

Umbigo

While the discussion about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific fields is no longer new, and a series of protocols and guidelines have been widely debated and established, the situation is different in the cultural and artistic sphere. There may be something in art and cultural production that resists the apparent inevitability of AI: art challenges certainties, moves through shifting contradictions, and probes the shadows of human experience — its achievements and its failures. Creation is the most human of civilizational phenomena, and delegating this capacity to algorithms and machines seems to open an ontological rift in the human purpose.

To engage with a debate that can seem tangled, Towards an Automated Art? Learning Machines, Human Creativity and Uncertainty is an e-book that critically examines the most relevant issues at the intersection of AI with art, theory, criticism, and art history.

Edited by Luis D. Rivero-Moreno and Helena Barranha as part of an international conference of the same title, Towards an Automated Art? is, however, much more than a compilation of notes and open-ended strands from the conference. It invites authors and participants to expand on certain issues, making it an important addition to the still limited bibliography on these topics. It is the second publication organized by the Art, Museums and Digital Cultures cluster, which, after Art, Museums and Digital Cultures → Rethinking Change, reinforces its commitment to fostering editions and debates that broaden the fields of art and museology in an era in which it has become impossible to think about the world without digital technologies.

The perspective is reversed in Meredith Tromble’s proposal: the question is no longer what AI can do for art, but what art can do for AI. The emphasis is on resisting simplification, drawing on essential references from history and aesthetics to propose a new critical vision of art in the present. From this standpoint, by deconstructing the idea of neutrality or neutralization, by reframing the debate around coexistence rather than substitution, and by challenging authorship, Towards an Automated Art? invites its authors and speakers to reflect on the multiple ramifications of the transdisciplinarity that connects these two poles. This volume includes essays and texts by Adelaide Rossi, Andrés Burbano, Anna-Lisa Scherfose, Helena Barranha, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Juan Martín Prada, Luis D. Rivero-Moreno, and Rita Cêpa, as well as a visual essay by Rodrigo Gomes.

The e-book is freely available and can be accessed on the cluster’s website.

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