call for proposals: issue 58.2_the mirror

Art + Australia is calling for proposals from artists, designers, architects, theorists and historians for ‘Issue 58.2_The Mirror’, dedicated to exploring AI and its burgeoning role in contemporary art through a uniquely Australian lens. We encourage submissions that investigate the ways in which AI intersects with artistic practice, its broader cultural and social implications, and challenges our understanding of the human.

In 2023 OpenAI launched ChatGPT-4 as a range of new, highly sophisticated AI technologies flooded the data-sphere. The new apps allow for complex image and video generation, text generation and code writing, which are rapidly becoming a new, non-human labour force instructed to perform novel tasks that edge us ever closer to artificial general intelligence. These AI interfaces have led to widespread debate, consternation and have reignited conversations around authorship, labour, technology, desire, value, surveillance, and education.

For this issue of Art + Australia, we welcome proposals that engage with the overarching theme of "The Mirror", an object and symbol of reflection, self-examination, and representation. Is AI technology simply a democratising mirror as Tim O’Reilly discusses? Does AI, as Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues, further disassemble and augment desire? Does it have the potential to eschew or reconfigure our current labour practices? What does art tell us about AI’s uses, fallibility, and bias? What futures are artists imagining with AI? Is AI yet another techno-bureaucracy accelerating the global feedback of contemporaneity?