Course Title: 01:082:491 Capstone in Art History
Required of Art History Majors. Non-majors may take this class, if space allows
SPECIAL PERMISSION NEEDED
Academic Credits: 3 credits
Mode of Instruction: Seminar
Course Prerequisites and Corequisites: 01:082:105,106 or permission of instructor
Core Curriculum: This course can be used to fulfill the WCd of the Core Curriculum. Open to Juniors and Seniors
Course Description:
Advanced study in selected area of art history.
Fall 2024
Photography and Artificial Intelligence
Capstone Seminar in Art History
Andrés Mario Zervigón, Professor of the History of Photography
On December 26th of last year, the New York Times photography critic Gideon Jacobs published a column with the following title: “A.I. Is the Future of Photography. Does That Mean Photography Is Dead?” The query, as our seminar will suggest, strikes not just at photography’s very identity as a medium. It also serves as a proxy for larger questions about the apparent threat that artificial intelligence poses for the human imagination. This seminar will correspondingly inquire into the relationship between AI-generated photography and the subjective agency of authorship, creativity, intention and perspective understood to be involved in the making of technology-based images, which photography has always been.
We will engage with academic and popular literature on the subjects of photography and artificial intelligence, and we will work hands-on in A.I.-generated imaging. Our readings will include critical writings on photography’s technical history, where we will see that the medium’s death has been pronounced regularly. Even in the 19th century, critics saw photography’s expiration with the introduction of mass-mechanically printed images in publications and, later in the 20th century, with the advent of digital imaging, e.g. Photoshop. In seminar discussion we will ask, did the medium really perish multiple times over the longer arc of its history, and might it die today? We will supplement these critical accounts with selections from the recent plethora of journalistic writing that anxiously reports on the fate of photography and the human imagination in the era of AI image generation.
Over the course of our reading and seminar discussion, students will devise text prompts for DAL-E 3, the most recent picture-generation engine offered by OpenAI at a modest price, and they will track the relationship between differences in their fine-tuned prompts, and the resulting image (see example below). Our goal will be to determine if what we are doing is photography at all or something altogether different that more closely resembles picture aggregation. In a seminar project, students will reference our assigned readings, and other literature from studies in photography and technology that they will find through research. Armed with these sources, they will reflect on their experience as artists, authors, and craftsmen/women in the making of their AI photograph.
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Disclaimer: These course descriptions/synopses pages have been provided as samples and the information should not be considered accurate or current. For actual course information, refer to the course site hosted by a Rutgers Learning Management System
Syllabus: The syllabus will be available on the Learning Management System (Sakai/Canvas) as of first day of class
DISCLAIMER: The Course Synopses pages have been provided as samples and the information should not be considered accurate or current. For actual course information, refer to the course site hosted by a Rutgers Learning Management System (Sakai, Canvas, etc.) first day of class.
