TechArt's Woe: Vandalism & Activism in the Modern Age

In eco-vandalism, art and ecology are often viewed through the lens of the potential power various communication vehicles hold. Activitists seeking to draw attention to their causes take to the cultural lifeblood that feeds us all - art and humanites. Fortunately, damage from assertive and aggressive acts such as thrown paint or food has been (so far) temporary, as was the case when Climate activists?splashed fluorescent orange paint?on Charles Ray’s sculpture “Horse with Rider” (2014) in the heart of Paris in November 2022, one of the latest in a recent series of attacks targeting works of art.

In another recent example, environmentalists posed the question of whether the desecration of a painting is worse than the wilful destruction of the planet. Climate activists hoped to spark attention and dialogue by throwing soup on one of the most famous and invaluable paintings in the world — Vincent Van Gogh’s "Sunflowers."

The effectiveness of eco-vandalism may be giving way to a new emergence of what I term "techart-vandalism" as the counter-culture moves against artificial intelligence art (AI art) and its perceived threats. That was the case at Champlain College in Burlington over the 2022 winter holiday break. In the student-run Stair Nook Gallery, senior Jaime Klingsberg (a creative media major) had installed his final project for a class on professional practices. His projection slideshow of 30 landscape images created using modified AI technology was ruined when vandals stole a USB thumb drive and left a no-AI art message behind. (Klingsberg could not be reached for comment.)

Not all techart-vandalism results in damage to physical objects or damage to one's career goals. In December, Hyperallergic reported that an AI-generated "demon" had emerged from one user’s experiments with a series of “negative prompt weights” on the DALL-E 2 platform. The figure, described by its artist as a “devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of rosacea(?) on her cheeks,” continued to crop up in subsequent images.

Trends towards active aggresion through art emerged as a significant theme in 2019, when Artnet outlined nine of the most egregious art attacks in modern history. They rated them on a scale of one to five, taking into account the severity of the attack, the likelihood of successful restoration, and the perpetrator’s audacity.

In fact, art activism on the whole is not new. in 1914, a portrait of philosopher Thomas Carlyle was vandalised by a British suffragette. In 1995, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei destroyed a 2,000-year-old cultural symbol to make his controversial work, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” and it remains one of his most famous works.

Just last month, in a devastating hit to global world heritage outside the confines of a museum building, vandals struck South Australia’s Koonalda Cave on on Nullarbor Plain, destroying 30,000-year-old artwork at the national heritage site. The cave is considered sacred by its owners, the Mirning people.

Even outside of the art and culture realm, technart vandalism in its early stages continues to present risk to users. Malicious code, such as the 'Trojan Puzzle,' represents an attack that stands out for bypassing static detection and signature-based dataset cleansing models, resulting in artificial intelligence (AI) models being trained to learn how to reproduce dangerous payloads.

The unknown and unpredictable appear to be our greatest future threats, a powerful fact art activists, advocates, and the general rebellion seem to nuture. In a potentially politically motivated techart attack, Sarah Andersen, (author of the popular online comic strip Sarah’s Scribbles) decribed how the alt-right community edited her artworks to promote racist, pro-Nazi views, even creating a font based on her handwriting to better mimic her text. Making matters worse, the A.I. trained on the artist’s work showed up as algorithm prompts generating versions of her distinctive-looking comic. (New York Times)

More than just provocateuring agents, techart vandals and activists have two great advantages in the emergence of AI's influence: 1) the fertile ground of the dialogue for and against art and technology; and 2) the yet-to-be-fully explored application potential. Developing lawsuits against AI's use of established art images, the anticipated emergence of an enhanced form of ChatGPT, newly established protocols and restrictions against AI generated works in universities, and the evidence of occasional disinformation created by AI, all lend to a volatile and chaotic state of art, AI, and the metaverse.

Sprout Social writer Jamea Kenan best summarized, "But the metaverse isn’t a utopia. Major industry players have been under fire for metaverse crimes and safety concerns. If the metaverse is the new frontier of the internet, it currently resembles the Wild West. There isn’t much regulation at the moment, which has led to inconsistent expectations and user experiences, especially surrounding security and privacy best practices." She offers business case problems and potential solutions. The art world had best take notice - we are in the debilitating age of progressively increasing shock value where the risk is little and the reward is great. Our expressions in art, tech, culture, and progress just may be the victims.