Rumours

‘Rumours’ is a series of short ‘Infomercial’ videos that purport to present University news updates. This screen-based work is intended to be delivered via screens on university campuses or via web-based news bulletin platforms. The work satirises the promotional messaging that Universities are obliged to engage with in relation to the marketisation of Higher Education within a contemporary neo-liberal landscape.
The conventions of this type of messaging are disrupted by an apparent over-reaching sense of ‘transparency’, a term often used in neo-liberal contexts, and information is akin to the fermentation of gossip in workplace corridors,
For us, producing research using an autoethnographical approach allows for a reflection on our experiences, as artists and academics operating within the institutions of the contemporary artworld, and Higher Education. Furthermore, as discussed by Ellis, this approach can allow for the effective engagement of other artists, university employees and those operating outside of these contexts (Ellis, 2011).
The use of generative AI is seen as appropriate in the context of the mismatch between certain views of an art school and the commercial systems and agendas it now has to operate within. Furthermore, the notion of the University as an entity, in and of itself, is comparable to the anthromoprhisation of ai systems, providing both with a sense of independent agency. (Jiang et al, 2023)
The dataset, that is provided at the outset of the model training, is limited to the imagery available online, which is, in itself, a resource offered by dominant commercial cultural forces. As Hito Steyerl argues, the ‘invitation’ for artists to use ai can be seen as a form of onboarding for commercial entities. (Brown, 2023)

Brown, K. (ed.) (2023) Hito Steyerl on why NFTs and A.I. image generators are
really just ‘Onboarding tools’ for tech conglomerates. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/these renderings-do-not-relate-to-reality-hito-steyerl-on-the-ideologies-embedded-in-a-i-image-generators-2264692.

Ellis, Carolyn, et al. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, vol. 36, no. 4 (138), 2011, pp. 273–90.

Harry H. Jiang, Lauren Brown, Jessica Cheng, Mehtab Khan, Abhishek Gupta, Deja Workman, Alex Hanna, Johnathan Flowers, and Timnit Gebru. 2023. AI Art and its Impact on Artists. In Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 363–374. https://doi.org/10.1145/3600211.3604681

This work was exhibited at óstöðugt kerfi / Unstable Systems, Iceland University of the Arts, Reykjavik.
11.-12. 09.2025.