I was there

Where is our freakishly successful envelope-pushing cultural infrastructure that stretches underneath it all like an undulating electric field pulsing with glory?

I had the opportunity this week to participate in a roundtable through the OCAD Policy Hub, called Dear Minister Solomon: Advice from the arts and creative industries on AI with Quelemia Sparrow, Jesse McKee, and Natalie Klym, and the incomparable Kelly Wilhelm moderating.

Preparing for it I decided to take the approach of thinking back to the early digital era (1995 ish) and what happened then with regard to the development of infrastructure for artists and the creative and cultural sector on a policy level, and trying to identify some of the lessons learned. I thought I’d put my notes here because why not.

I think everyone in the cultural sector would like to see Canada be a breathtaking cauldron of creative activity that stuns and surprises not only our own population but the entire world with our inventive and experimental cultural exports. Who among us does not wish we were known throughout the galaxy for fabulous taste, great design, a perpetual Renaissance-style profusion of artists and artistic practices, and freakishly successful envelope-pushing cultural infrastructure that stretches like an undulating electric field underneath it all, pulsing with glory.

I think we would all likely recommend at least one or two small changes to our national institutions in order to fully manifest that vision. I for one tend to focus on the digital side of things, which for me right now extends into thinking about how we should act in relation to the numinous murmuration of generative AI that is both coming and somehow already here.

So

First - The arts in Canada, for some reason, don’t seem to include all of the arts. (Like, didn’t anybody notice that we don’t have a place for design in our federal cultural policy frameworks?) I’d love to see our concept of culture expand to include artists and practitioners working across visual and media arts, publishing, performance, AR/VR/XR, spatial, immersive, fashion, design, music, film and moving image, sound, architectural, curatorial, craft and material practices, game design, arts and science collaborations, heritage and archival work, interdisciplinary domains.

I think it’s especially pertinent at this AI moment to resist categorization, not least because generative AI has the potential to spawn entirely new categories of cultural practice that we can’t pretend to anticipate.

When I think of what it means to resist categorization, I arrive at a notion of experimentation as a principle and value, thinking that a national policy that supports open experimentation is the likeliest way for Canada to not fuck up the emergence of the next wave of totally unforeseen forms of cultural expression.

Key Policy Failures to Avoid:

Canada's digital media policies and bodies in the pre- and early internet era (e.g., Canada Media Fund, Creative BC, National Film Board, Banff New Media Institute, Canadian Heritage, Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund) have (and some continue to) play critical roles in fostering access, experimentation, and innovation. We are living the results of Digital Canada Version One. But it’s time for the sequel - what should we do differently this time?

The Marginalization of Artists: Many early digital-era funding programs prioritized film, television, “convergent media”, and interactive commercial content while under-supporting independent visual and media arts. We saw an over-reliance on commercial viability as funding criteria and programs that privileged immediate commercial or export potential (e.g., games, convergent things for children, interactive websites for films, e-learning platforms). It was the definition of skeuomorphic. Digital art was treated on one hand as not digital and on the other hand as not art. The artists who were pioneering digital forms, functions, ideas, methodologies, and aesthetics were pretty much obviated from federal and provincial innovation ecosystems.

Siloed Funding Models and Weak Cross-Sector Collaboration: Many digital initiatives were locked into disciplinary or sector-specific frameworks (e.g., tech innovation separate from cultural production, academic and industry research isolated from practice). This prevented artists from accessing tools & funding and created unnecessary and ultimately death spiral-shaped barriers preventing collaboration, true newness and learning across domains.

Short-Term, Project-Based Funding Without Infrastructural Continuity: Many digital programs prioritized short-term outputs over long-term capacity building, leading to cycles of innovation followed by collapse. The effect of this was that it fragmented knowledge transfer and severely hindered sustained research, creation, production, presentation, and documentation cultures. What was accomplished in this era was done against a firestorm of impossibility. You’d be amazed what we could have done if funders had not been dropping elaborate traps and hefty three-dimensional monsters Hunger Games style in our way every time we got close to managing to pull something off.

So what am I suggesting we do

Create a Canada Generative Arts Fund: A national fund specifically designed to support AI-based art, experimentation, speculative media forms, and generative AI-enabled creative practices across disciplines. On day one maybe we’d be seeing things like participatory and conversational AI artworks, adaptive narrative systems, AI-assisted live performance systems, generative scenography and virtual production, interactive architectural environments, experimental hybrid forms that emerge at the intersection of disciplines and resist categorization. On day two - who knows?

This is not what I am talking about

Establish AI Culture Labs to create permanent interdisciplinary artistic research and production spaces. Collaborate with major AI research institutions (e.g., MILA, Vector) and cultural organizations to support long-term, interdisciplinary experimentation and public engagement. Provide long-term support for collaborative research, public programming, and transdisciplinary inquiry.

Make artistic experimentation a pillar of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy alongside Commercialization, Standards, and Talent & Research. Or a section of the Research or something. Speaking of this, where is the Creative Supercluster? We’ve got a Digital Supercluster but sorry not that kind of digital. It is obvious that a massive part of future creative endeavours will involve digital innovation, but if the Digital Supercluster doesn’t want us maybe we establish a creative AI lab-wing in each of them. I’d love to see what we could do in Protein.

Explore technical, creative, and access-based partnerships with global AI platforms like Open AI. For example subsidized or sponsored access to generative tools for Canadian creators, API credits and custom deployments for cultural organizations and public programming.

Co-develop programs with Indigenous communities; uphold OCAP principles in cultural data use; and fund Indigenous-led AI systems. I feel like this is already clearly and purposefully on the table, but I would be remiss not to mention it. But further - doesn’t it seem like we have something tangible to learn from Indigenous protocols around knowledge keeping that could inform how we deal with AI on data management in spheres of activity that are not specifically related to Indigenous activity? We often talk about how to regulate AI so as not to re-colonialize Indigenous knowledge, but maybe not often enough about how Indigenous nations figured out how to regulate data a long time ago and maybe those methodologies could translate.¹

Expand AI literacy and training across art education, public programming, and cultural sector leadership, i.e.) artist fellowships, mentorship programs, curriculum partnerships, residency streams, co-op placements for students.

Partner with regional arts bodies to distribute funds and add capacity-building streams for institutions (e.g., training curators, upgrading infrastructure) and support for digital transformation plans tied to AI experimentation.

Explore Universal Basic Income pilots and the formation of attribution tools in public AI systems that enable emergent forms of revenue sharing and artist compensation. Do this from a position of interest and curiosity about how currency flows, not from a position of hangry fear.

Build a Public Creative AI Commons: A publicly funded infrastructure to ensure Canadian creators can access and shape the technologies that define the next generation of cultural production such as generative AI tools, datasets, and shared knowledge i.e.) a national portal for open datasets (e.g., with NFB, CBC archives) and public compute access (e.g., GPU credits or training sandboxes)

Would love to hear other people’s perspectives on this, particularly if anyone’s got a gripping tale about Netscape Navigator or VRML.

1. Some of this came up in the panel, via Quelemia Sparrow, who is awesome.