Art History Lecture: Sonja Drimmer

Tuesday, September 16, 2025 at 4:30pm
Boger Hall, Room 112, 41 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut

Free and open to the public.

Sonja Drimmer, Associate Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will discuss the relationship between artificial intelligence and the practice of art history in the lecture "Extracting the Past: How the 'AI' Industry Exploits Art History and What We Can Do to Stop It."

Over the last several years, universities and museums have partnered with commercial technology firms like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, who have promised that their AI products will enhance both historical research and accessibility to historical collections. These promises, however, are not supported by the reality of what computer vision--the branch of AI most relevant to the history of art--can achieve. So why have major institutions in education and the arts been so quick to take up these firms' offers?

This talk responds to this question by providing an introduction to computer vision's origins in military surveillance, an overview of its development under late capitalist regimes of exploitative micro-labor, and an orientation to how computer vision works. However, the main focus of this talk is not what computer vision does. Rather, Drimmer considers the culture of the AI industry, its main objectives, and the dangerous vision for the future that it promises--and whether those promises are credible or even in good faith. This vision for the future has relied on extracting history, and art history in particular, and Drimmer argues that it is our responsibility as art historians to be knowledgeable about the forms this extraction takes. Drimmer concludes with suggestions about what we can do to protect the subjects and practitioners of our discipline, as well as education in the humanities more broadly, against this incursion. Drimmer does not intend an intransigent rejection of a given technology; rather this talk articulates a challenge that is grounded in knowledge of the historical origins and corporate practices of the AI industry today.

Drimmer is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A scholar of medieval European art with expertise in illuminated manuscripts and early print, Drimmer's longstanding interests in premodern notions of reproduction, replication, and media theory have led her to move beyond the medieval world and focus on the relationship between modern technology--from photography to artificial intelligence--and the history of art. Her first book, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476 (UPenn, 2018) is the first study devoted to the origins of the English literary canon as an illustrated corpus, and it received High Commendation for Exemplary Scholarship from the Historians of British Art. She is currently completing a monograph titled Impressive Politics: Print before the Press in Late Medieval England. Her writing on AI has appeared in both public and academic venues, including Artforum, The International Journal for Digital Art History, The Conversation, Art in America, and Art News.