16. Innovation, AI, and Materiality: Learning from the Arts

This chapter develops our understanding of innovation through learning from the arts. Empirically, I focus on four Finland-based new media artists who co-create with Artificial Intelligence (AI). I ask how the artists relate to AI, a material agent potentially changing their practices of artmaking, as well other significant materialities, like human bodies and other tools present in the artistic innovation process. Building on eight interviews with the artists, I discuss the varied meanings the artists attribute to AI and materiality in their work. Also, I illustrate how the artists describe the artistic innovation process emerging through the relational dynamics between objects and human bodies. Besides the human artist and AI, other vital materialities have a central yet often neglected role in artmaking. Finally, I conclude by discussing why the materiality of the innovation process merits fuller scholarly attention, also in ways that go beyond the artistic context.