Guest of Honor: Grant D. Taylor
“The Generative Art Summit represents an important convergence of pioneering and contemporary practitioners, art historians, collectors, and curators. The program will no doubt produce vital dialogue around historical and contemporary forms of generative art and help us both celebrate and understand this unique site of cultural production.”
Presentation and panel “The Futurologists: Predicating an Expanding Medium”
In his panel presentation Grant D. Taylor will explore our deep-seated desire to predict the future of art. With the rise of generative AI and the expanding digital marketplace, forecasting the impact of emergent technologies remains ever-present. By surveying history, we find futurological narratives dominate generative art discourse since its beginnings in the mid twentieth century. Theorists and artists (Herbert W. Franke being a central figure) became sought-after prognosticators, effectively satisfying our desire to categorize the present forms of new art and imagine possible futures. While some predictions were often prophetic, others reflected the difficulties of complex systems and the inherence of human bias.
However, as we examine these speculations in retrospect, we perhaps discover that generativity itself, especially in its capacity for novelty and the unexpected, seems to ultimately defy futurology.
Biography
Grant D. Taylor ist the author ofWhen the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art and curator of the travelling exhibition of The American Algorists: Linear Sublime. Taylor is Director of Creative Arts and Professor of Art & Art History at Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania, U.S A.