[spectre] Decentring Ethics: AI Art as Method - open access book from OHP

[Gary Hall]

Continuing to look back over some of the books Open Humanities Press has 
published in 2025, September saw the publication of Decentring Ethics: 
AI Art as Method, edited by Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn and 
Emilie K. Sunde

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Decentring Ethics is available 
open access (= it can be downloaded for free):

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/decentring-ethics/


Book description

Artists and cultural institutions are a vital force in the construction 
of a relational, collectively held ethics of human-machine assemblages. 
Technological change always out-paces ethical governance, producing an 
uncertain zone between what machines can do, and what is upheld as 
ethical by diverse publics. Working in ways that are often speculative 
and provocative, artists trace ethical tensions as they are emerging in 
public consciousness.

AI ethics developed by big tech has been critiqued for its 
performativity and lack of equity. Working in the gaps left unfilled by 
recent developments in national and international policy, this volume 
explores artists’ and curators’ radical visions for who or what requires 
ethical protection. This volume pushes past regulatory obligations and 
towards ethics as a way of being in the world.

The book advances a decentred approach to ethics. It draws on 
non-Western, ecocritical and feminist worldviews, and acknowledges the 
more-than-human as an agent with the capacity to act. We position AI art 
as ‘method’ – a process of working with, or in response to, the 
contemporary computational era. This expands the normative definition of 
AI art as art created with relative autonomy by computers. AI art as 
method frames ethics as situated, embodied and improvisational, whereby 
artists work with emergent ethical questions while challenging the more 
conservative frameworks of the cultural institutions they operate 
within. While AI art often utilises the materiality or software of 
machine learning, this is not a pre-requisite for AI art as method.

The book contains commissioned essays, in conversation pieces and 
artistic interventions, compiled by Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn 
and Emilie K Sunde. It includes contributions by: Dani Admiss; Aarati 
Akkapeddi; Nora Al-Badri; Vanessa Bartlett; Gabby Bush; Sean Cubitt; 
Xanthe Dobbie; Solange Glasser, Ben Loveridge, Margaret Osborne, Lucy 
Sparrow, and Ryan Kelly; Libby Heaney; Helen Knowles; Jeannie Marie 
Paterson; Jasmin Pfefferkorn; Off Site Project; Iyad Rahwan; Kamya 
Ramachandran; Tyne Daile Sumner, Emilie K. Sunde; Amanda Wasielewski and 
others.

The volume extends the work of AAIDE (Vanessa Bartlett, Gabby Bush, 
Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Tyne Sumner and Emilie K Sunde), based at The Centre 
for AI and Digital Ethics, University of Melbourne (2021-2024).


Editor Bios

Emilie K. Sunde is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and 
Communication at The University of Melbourne. Her dissertation is a 
conceptual thesis photography theory, computation, and AI-images. She is 
currently developing a project that draws on an eco-critical approach to 
the latent spaces of Generative AI models, to develop a shared language 
of latent space between STEM and HASS disciplines. She is also the 
co-founder and director of the research group CODED AESTHETICS.

Vanessa Bartlett is a curator and interdisciplinary research leader. 
Drawing on her own lived experiences, she explores how medical and 
technical systems shape equity, ethics and social justice, particularly 
for disabled and chronically ill folk. Her curated exhibitions exploring 
the psychosocial impacts of digital cultures have been seen at 
international arts spaces such as FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative 
Technology), UNSW Galleries and Furtherfield and have featured in The 
Guardian, Creative Review and BBC Radio 4. She has edited two books for 
award-winning academic publisher Liverpool University Press, the most 
recent of which was co-edited with Professor Henrietta Bowden Jones, one 
of the UK’s most high-profile neuroscience researchers. She leads 
several collaborative creative practice projects including AAIDE: The 
Art, AI and Digital Ethics research collective at The Centre for AI and 
Digital Ethics University of Melbourne; and Stomach Ache, which explores 
the gap between emerging microbiome science and lived experiences of 
digestive dysfunction through curatorial methods. She was Mckenzie 
Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication 
(2020-2023), and is currently a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law, 
at University of Melbourne.

Jasmin Pfefferkorn is a Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellow in Culture and 
Communication at The University of Melbourne. She is currently 
researching the impact of generative technologies on museums’ practice. 
Her research is at the intersection of critical AI and museum studies, 
with an emphasis on the relation between technics and culture in 
emerging socio-cultural milieus. She also has expertise in affect 
theory, assemblage systems theory, media studies, aesthetic theory, and 
visual culture. Jasmin is the author of the monograph Museums as 
Assemblage (Routledge, 2023). She is also the co-founder and director of 
the research group CODED AESTHETICS, which takes an experimental 
approach to exploring human-machine entanglement in sensing and 
sense-making.


Series

The book is published as part of the DATA Browser series, edited by 
Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa: 
https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/data-browser/

-- 
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University

Director of Open Humanities Press: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Blog: http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/

Latest:

Book: Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

Journal issue: Ecologies of Dissemination issue of PARSE Journal #21 - Summer 2025, edited by Eva Weinmayr and Femke Snelting: https://parsejournal.com/journal/#ecologies-of-dissemination. (I'm one of the contributors to this experimental issue which emphasizes collective over individual authorship.)

Video: 'Liquidate AI Art', Computer Arts Society: https://www.bcs.org/events-calendar/2025/october/webinar-liquidate-ai-art

Talk: 'The Independent Intellectual vs Posting Zero and the Dead Internet': http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/12/2/the-independent-intellectual-vs-posting-zero-and-the-dead-in.html