Denise Ferreira da Silva is a philosopher and artist from Brazil. Rizvana Bradley is a scholar of media studies from the United States. The two researchers work with black feminist thought, critical theory and artistic practice to develop new ways of being and thinking the world in interaction with art.
Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri, Sensing Salon, HANGAR, Lisbon, Portugal. January 14 to 18, 2020. Photo: Nuno Barroso/Kadist Foundation
Quotation
To toil within or rail against the field of representation is already to be enmeshed in the aesthetic, for it is by way of the aesthetic that the ontological ground on which we are said to stand becomes experience. (...) Once released from the anticipation of order and the presumption of meaning, the artwork becomes liberated from its representational obligations to nature and world (...). Black Aesthetics (...) signals an other site for the analysis of artistic creation, collective existence, and political practice.
Take a few minutes to reread the quote from Ferreira da Silva and Bradley. The phrase ‘ontological ground’ is a condensed way of saying ‘the basics of how beingness (or what it means to be) is understood’.
Slowly, and with patient deliberation, try to restate the three sentences of Ferreira da Silva and Bradley in your own words.
From what you know of the typical images generated by Artificial Intelligence, in what way do you think that they, and the processes used to create them, further exacerbate the focus on form over matter in art?
Think about the definition of "Black Aesthetics" offered by Ferreira da Silva and Bradley. If Kite & Wormsley's Cosmologyscape (see previous chapters) is treated as an example of Black Aesthetics, how does its process of recomposing and decomposing Artificial Intelligence as "Abundant Intelligences" offer what Ferreira da Silva and Bradley call "an other site of artistic creation, collective existence and political practice"?
