Episode 47: Minor Tech - Alternative AI Platforms with Christian Ulrik Andersen

Host Scott Rettberg speaks with Aarhus University Associate Professor Christian Ulrik Andersen about autonomous AI imaging and his co-authored book, Objects of Interest and Necessity. They examine how fringe user communities, micro-models, and platforms like Civitai, AI Horde, and Hugging Face challenge big-tech dominance in generative AI. The conversation also delves into "minor tech" strategies, alternative infrastructures, and the role of digital art in rethinking our political and cultural relationship to technology.

References

Andersen, C. U., & Cox, G. (2017). The Metainterface: The Art ofPlatforms Cities and Clouds. MIT Press.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038133/the-metainterface/

Andersen,C. U., Milev, N., & Velasco, P. (2024). Objects of Interest and Necessity:A Tour Guide to Autonomous AI Imaging. Digital Aesthetics Research Center /Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI).

https://darc.au.dk/publications/darc-books

Deleuze,G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (D. Polan, Trans.).University of Minnesota Press.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816615155/kafka/

LAION(Large-scale AI Open Network). (2021). Open-Source Datasets and MachineLearning Infrastructure. LAION.

https://laion.ai/

Marx,L. U.(2020). The Small File Media Festival. Simon Fraser University Schoolfor the Contemporary Arts.

https://smallfile.ca/

Pamuk,O. (2012). TheMuseum of Innocence. Vintage Books.

https://www.orhanpamuk.net/book.aspx?id=96&lng=eng

Rombach, R., Blattmann, A., Lorenz, D., Esser, P.,& Ommer, B. (2022). High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVFConference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 10684–10695.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10752