Art, Misuse and Technology

In Art, Misuse and Technology: Miche l O'Connell's 'System Interference' John Roberts provides a wide-ranging and compelling analysis of Miche l O'Connell's artistic deflation and subversion of technical systems. Addressing current debates on digital culture, the posthuman and computational reason, Roberts examines the relationship between the power of the technosystem we use and inhabit on a daily basis and the critical demands required to being a technical-literate artist. Artists are no longer simply defined by the tools they use, but by their comprehension and navigation of the ways in which Artificial Intelligence shapes and defines the cognitive and visual parameters of our world. As such artists are as much concerned with what 'thinking machines' delimit as with what they enable. O'Connell operates, Roberts argues, in this gap, through combining a technical understanding of the algorithms that govern our work practices, social relationships and desires, and a robust, comedic, refunctioning of their claims for efficiency and reason. In this Roberts calls for a critique of computational reason that positions artists as part of a wider struggle around the non-dominative and anti-instrumental uses of technology.