On April 17th, cluster members, faculty, RAs, partners, and artists in residence gathered together at the University of Toronto Scarborough for Creative Labour and Critical Futures’ (CLCF) First Annual Research Day. With around 20 in attendance, the day was spent sharing short “conversation starters” around everyone’s research followed by periods of lively collective reflections and discussion. The CLCF cluster brings together faculty from different career stages and disciplines across several arts, culture, and media fields of study—as evidenced by research encompassing the music industry, streaming TV, journalism, arts, and platforms across Canada, Nigeria, Brazil and China. Yet across this diverse collection of research, employing methods from autoethnography to discourse analysis to counter-mapping, several themes and provocations emerged.
Photos courtesy of Daphne Rena Idiz
🎨 Creativity
human-non-human
artistic intelligence
what’s creative now?
- Who gets to make art, and what is art in the context of generative AI?
- How can artistic intelligence work in relation to artificial intelligence? In what ways does artistic intelligence (as applied practices of artistic knowing and sensing across humans and non-humans) reframe AI and vice-versa?
⚖️ Copyright/IP
AI copies, right?
forget your residuals
up next: yesterday
- What does AI mean for ownership and licensing, across contexts?
- How does AI map onto pre-existing challenges for creative workers around IP rights and investment?
- How is authorship challenged or complicated by generative AI?
🤖 Labour
let’s work creative
I’ll tell you under table
whose pockets are lined
- Who counts as a creative worker and what counts as creative labour?
- What are the ramifications of different levels of formalization (more or less unionized, formal versus informal) across contexts?
- What are the notions of power embedded in datasets and the theoretical/political conditions they are entrenched in? Where is the potential for data sovereignty and data autonomy?
📚 AI literacy
less a mystery
of what is black box hidden
when we play the game
- How do people in different contexts engage or are learning to engage with AI?
- What tacit knowledges do we have of processes and technologies that can help us understand AI?
- How can we interrogate AI discourses and counter discourses?
Bookending the day, CLCF’s operations team shared highlights from various projects, speaker series, and forthcoming special issues edited by CLCF members. Collective brainstorming around CLCF year two brought up opportunities for grant and project collaborations, exciting events including a hotly anticipated book event for Heavy Processing, topical conferences coming up, potential artist and researcher residencies, and even hints of a CLCF podcast in the making. Watch this space!
🦄 CLCF swag!
Delicious lunch by Palestine Bakeshop.
Photos courtesy of Daphne Rena Idiz
📣 Full list of speakers: Alessandro Delfanti, Aline Zara, Carly Sheridan, Cate Alexander, Daphne Idiz, David Nieborg, Elena Altheman, Fabiana Benedito, Godwin Simon, Hadiya Roderique, Helen Yung, Helena Wright, Jas Rault, Laura Risk, Mark Campbell, Mary Elizabeth (M.E.) Luka, Rafael Grohmann, Sanaz Mazinani, T.L. Cowan, Yi Gu
Haiku by Aline Zara, in collaboration with Daphne Idiz.
CLCF Co-Director & Postdoctoral Fellow
Daphne Rena Idiz (she/her) is a Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC).
Research Assistant
Aline Zara (they/she) is a Ph.D. candidate and artist at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information. Their research focuses on voice, sound, embodiment, and AI at the intersection of critical AI studies, voice and sound studies, transfeminist science & technology studies, disability studies, and queer studies.
CLCF Co-Director & Associate Professor
Dr. MaryElizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka is PI and Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and Associate Professor, Arts & Media Management, at University of Toronto, where they examine modes and meanings of co-creative production and distribution in the digital age for arts, culture, and media.
CLCF Co-Director & Assistant Professor
Rafael Grohmann is a Co-lead and Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the University of Toronto. Rafael is the leader of the DigiLabour initiative and founding editor of the Platforms & Society journal.
