[Question motivated by personal interest: I’m asking for myself, not for my employer.]
I’m interested in a wide variety of media; the two most important factors here seem to be relevance to EA and the inherent coolness of the artwork. We could use this an opportunity to crowdsource examples and kick off a conversation about art and EA if there’s one that “wants to happen.”
Some things to consider:
- Creative data visualizations
- Animations or videos
- E.g. Kurzgesagt stuff like Worst Nuclear Accidents in History or The Egg - A Short Story
- Comics or graphic novels
- AI-generated art
- (you could make the case that it’s a useful illustration of growing capabilities of AI)
- E.g. DALL·E: Creating Images from Text, or this AI-generated art on Twitter
- Symbolic art
- E.g. Proposed Longtermist Flag (see the comments)
- Especially cool scientific art
- E.g. penicillin art, or pretty scientific illustrations like this and this (although they might be less relevant)
- Relevant photography
- E.g. Peaceful protester/armed police pictures, or these photos of chickens (potentially less relevant)
- Fiction or other writing
- We’ve had a variety of places to collect instances of creative writing, but I see no reason to exclude it if you think of something
- Musical works (although there’s already a question on the topic)
- Board and video games?
- E.g. the paperclips clicker game (warning: don’t click if you’re easily addicted to something and don’t have a few hours)
- Random EA-related art
- Inspirational art
- Visual art that inspires compassion towards the very neglected
- Insightful art
- ...including parodies and satires
If you don’t think the relevance of your answer(s) is obvious, you might consider explaining it.
If you’ve made some art you think is relevant, I’d really love to see it. I realize that it’s quite intimidating to post art (at least to me), but even if you don’t want to share publicly, I’d really appreciate any private sharing you’re comfortable with. (But I do encourage you to share it on the Forum if you can!)
Some relevant tags and posts:
Good point. Here are a couple of historical pieces & thoughts on types of things historical art can do.
[Disclaimer: written quickly, links are half-assed.]
There are many more extremely moving pieces of art from other terrible historical events. Notebooks from GULAG camps by Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya survive. (Some images here --- note that they're quite graphic.) There's Goya's Disasters of War. There's a ton of cool (and sad) plague art of various kinds (some of "plague" art is leprosy art, actually)
There are paintings and depictions of awesome (or interesting) historical figures. E.g. you can search for cool paintings of Frederick Douglass (there are many).
I could make the argument that some forms of art are EA-related because they can give viewers today a sense of connection with the relatively far past, and then we can extrapolate into the far future. Fayum mummy portraits often make me feel this way; these are paintings of people who lived 2000 years ago, some of whom look like people I know. I also sometimes feel this way about reconstructions of ancient people. On the flip side, really ancient art that's minimalistic & modern-looking also sometimes gives me this feeling.
Some Fayum mummy portraits:
I think some art illustrates thinking-of-the-time in interesting ways. Take this painting that depicts proverbs (iirc, it was made for a collector-- it should definitely not be thought of as "folk art"). There's a bunch of "scientific art" that's interesting (or interesting to study).
Some really old art (e.g. 1, 2) just impresses me so much (by surviving, still being beautiful) that I too want to make things that will last.
Some art is tied to fascinating historical events. For instance, Galileo's drawings of the moon (or Robert Hooke's fly eyes).
While we're sort of on the topic of art history: I remember going to an exhibition that explains how much different objects of art would have been worth to Northern Europeans in the ~16th century (in terms of how many cows things would cost), and reading the associated blog post, and found it really interesting. (This was a while back, so I don't remember how relevant it was, but it might be.)