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A.I. and Online Communities: Art, Bodies, and Systems
This conversation brings together artist-researcher J. Rosenbaum and theorist-artist Michael Betancourt for a wide-ranging discussion on how AI is reshaping identity, perception, power, and social life. While grounded in their respective practices—Rosenbaum’s work on gender classification, participatory machine learning, and representation, and Betancourt’s research into automation, digital ideology, and critical glitching—the discussion expands beyond online community to address AI’s deeper social and political consequences.
Moving between personal experience, artistic methodology, and structural critique, the speakers examine what contemporary AI systems reveal, what they erase, and what they enforce. Topics include data extraction, visibility and risk, automation as ideology, and the ways AI reorganizes relationships between individuals, communities, and institutions. Rather than treating AI as a neutral tool, the conversation asks harder questions about who benefits, who is made vulnerable, and what kinds of futures are being normalized.
Moderated by Bee Nix.
J. Rosenbaum & Michael Betancourt
J. Rosenbaum and Michael Betancourt come from distinct yet complementary traditions in art and critical theory. Rosenbaum is a Melbourne-based AI artist and researcher whose practice spans 3D modeling, artificial intelligence, and extended reality technologies. Their work explores posthuman and postgender possibilities by blending classical art vocabularies with new media techniques and custom programming. Betancourt is a Cuban-American research artist whose conceptual and theoretical practice fuses media art with critical analysis focused on art history, digital technology, and capitalist ideology, including automation, digital capitalism, and the myth of the “machine artist.” Together, they offer two different yet resonant approaches to understanding AI, one grounded in embodied experience and community engagement, and the other centered on systems critique and the aesthetics of failure.
