Agentic Aesthetics Puts Rhizome's Panel Series on AI Agents

Agentic Aesthetics is the newest edition of Net Aesthetics, the panel series Rhizome has run since 2005 to capture where artists stand on internet culture at a given moment. It takes place at the New Museum Theater on Wednesday, with a free livestream. Rhizome's announcement opens on a line from a 1979 IBM training manual: a computer can never be held accountable, so a computer must never make a management decision. The subject is agentic AI, systems that act on their surroundings and on user input with some autonomy.

Ian Cheng is the panelist closest to games. Cheng's live simulations, including the Emissaries trilogy and BOB (Bag of Beliefs), are made in a game engine and run as agents that pursue their own goals without a script, so viewers watch behavior rather than a story.

The second session pairs Cheng with Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose chatbot and avatar works go back to the 1990s, the artist and machine-learning educator Gene Kogan, and Franco Mattes, half of Eva and Franco Mattes, whose cursed cat image now breeds inside AI training data. Rhizome's Michael Connor moderates. The first session launches Intersubjectivity IV: Network Affect (Sternberg Press), with editors Kolja Gläser and Adina Glickstein and presentations by Bogna Konior and Dawn Chan. The last edition, Neural Net Aesthetics, ran in 2023.