What can art do for artificial intelligence? This essay circles around this question from a viewpoint grounded in the embodied knowledge base of contemporary art. The author employs the term “feelthink” to refer to the shifting webs of perception, emotion, thought, and action probed by artists engaging AI. Tracing several metaphors used by artists to consider AI, the author identifies points where the metaphors delaminate, pulling away from the phenomena to which they refer. The author advocates for these partial and imagistic understandings of AI as probes which, despite or because of their flaws, contribute important ideas for the development and cultural positioning of AI entities. The author further questions the limited scope of art ideas addressed in AI research and proposes a thought experiment in which art joins industry as a source of questions for developing artificial intelligences. In conclusion, the essay’s structuring metaphor is described as an example of “feelthink” at work.

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Both an introduction to PUBLIC #59 and a rumination on the difficulty of interspecies communication, this essay argues for art and interspecies communication as means of building mental and emotional qualities useful for re-imagining culture in a time of rapid environmental change, embedding a self-reflexive example in the text.

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