The Google brain team drives many artificial intelligence
initiatives, including magenta, a project that
uses machine learning to develop algorithms
that can create art and music.
Magenta offers tools artists can use to make their own work
but also gleans data from those artists that it then
uses to enhance magenta's machine learning, in an attempt
to figure out whether machines might actually create
compelling art on their own.
And it's the two terms "compelling" and "on their own"
that I'd like to focus on.
Because in my book, yes, machines make art.
If you'd like to identify as art this terrifying image I created
by feeding a selfie into the Deep Dream generator,
a neural network trained in this case to see dog
faces in everything, then good on you.
Or perhaps you really respond to this award winning machine
generated sonnet that was judged against poetry created
by humans, which concludes with the couplet,
"Behind the wall silence alone replied.
Was then even the staircase occupied."
Or maybe you really like this music video
by Taryn Southern, whose music track and video art
were created using artificial intelligence.
If you think it's art, then it's art.
Video over.
But the better questions to my mind are,
can we really consider any art to be purely machine generated
without a great and powerful Oz setting it into motion
or at least operating somewhere in the background?
And more importantly, what is it that we
find compelling about art made by machines?
Or put another way, where is the art in machine made art?
If we look back through the history of humans making things
and other people appreciating them,
we see a long line of artists embracing technology,
starting with very basic things, like paleolithic humans blowing
pigment through hollow bird bones
to create stencil hand prints.
Or Greek crafts people using compasses
to trace perfect circles and innovating
kiln-firing techniques, to produce
the characteristic red and black colors of their pottery.
Artists have used a huge range of tools to mold and manipulate
materials, render objects more realistically,
and do things that the human body alone just can't.
Even if we're not stretching our definitions of technology
or machines, you can think about artists
as early as the Renaissance using camera obscuras
as drawing aids.
A number of scholars believe Jan Vermeer likely
used a camera obscura to help achieve
his incredibly lifelike sense of dimensionality and perspective.
As soon as photography was invented,
artists began to use it in their art making process
or as their art making process.
For a long time photography wasn't considered
an art in itself, too easily achieved,
some argued, by the press of a button.
Automated making was often associated with or relegated
to the realm of craft.
The Jacquard loom, invented in 1804,
is a machine controlled by a chain of punch cards strung
together in a sequence, allowing the weaver to program
the loom to create complicated patterns and effects.
This innovation is considered to be a critical step
toward computing.
But did the punch cards make the textiles, or did a human?
As the 20th century progressed, we
see more and more instances of artists making what we
can think of as art machines.
Sure, there was art made about life
in the machine or industrial age.
But there were also electrically powered kinetic sculptures
like this one, made in 1930 by Bauhaus denizen Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy, who believed that art and technology, working
together, had the power to transform society
in a good way.
For Swiss artist Jean Tinguely's 1960 work,
"Homage to New York," he set up a self-destructing mechanism
in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art
in New York.
It performed for 27 minutes.
And afterward, the public were invited
to pick up remnants of the machine and take them home.
Jumping forward and skipping loads
of fascinating instances of mechanical art,
there's Roxy Paine's SCUMAK devices--
the first of which was made in 1998--
which poor hot polyethylene onto a conveyor belt, where
it pools and builds and hardens into globular forms,
each unique, but each the result of an identical mechanical
process.
Or Paine's "Painting Manufacturing Unit,
who's computer-controlled nozzle, attached
to a vat of white paint, intermittently sprays a canvas,
resulting in a series of paintings that look like this.
In each of these instances, the authorship is relatively clear.
The artist made or programmed the machine
that does the thing.
And they attach their name to it, as its generative force.
Even if their results are largely or even completely out
of their control, whatever happens
is still the result of a human being, the artist,
having put it in motion.
They've embraced chance, randomness, and in some cases,
geology and gravity, to challenge
our notions of originality and still lay claim to the result.
But where or when is the tipping point between when humans
use AI to make art, and when the AI can
be credited as the artist?
Is the algorithm making the decisions or the person
who designed the algorithm?
We tend to think of AI as separate from us.
And in the sense that we can't always trace its learning
process, it is.
But we also don't fully understand
the forces that render a SCUMAK sculpture into its shape.
And that's how we get to the question of how art made by AI
can be compelling.
Let's assume for a moment that there is a work of art
that we can accept as truly separate
from human involvement.
There may be a lot to appreciate about it, in terms
of its formal qualities, optical effects, or synthesis
of vast amounts of information.
But when I look at a deep dream generated image, for example,
the thing that compels me most is the algorithm
that underlies it.
I linger over these images not to ponder
how my mouth can become several dog eyes,
but because I want to figure out which data sets it pulls from.
And who came up with the generator's optional layers?
And what assumptions about art were
lodged in the biological brains of the human team behind it?
We're led back to the age old question of artists' intent.
Does it matter whether the artist is sentient or not?
And is it even possible to judge a work
without a consideration of its author, context, and origin?
If you're someone who likes to see evidence
of a lot of hard work when you look at art,
does it make a difference to know that a robot made it?
Would you find enjoyment in marveling over the kind
of sustained, precise work an automated device can accomplish
that a human probably couldn't?
Or would you rather marvel over artwork
made by the humans who figured out
the optics of some of our best loved works
of Neo-Impressionism?
Or Australian aboriginal dot paintings?
Or even this painting, executed primarily
by the assistance of Damien Hirst, who nevertheless
has insisted, "Every single spot painting
contains my eye, my hand, and my heart."
One of the reasons you might appreciate art--
sentimental though it may be--
is because it's a connection between you
and another human being.
You may be separated by centuries or continents.
But you're spending time with a piece of paper
that someone else spent time with.
You're contemplating an arrangement of forms or an idea
that once resided in the mind or presence of someone other
than you.
When we look at objects from times and places
and cultures other than our own, there's
always a lot we don't know.
Archaeologists and art historians
seek to discover the motivations behind these objects,
to enhance our understanding of what it is, why it is,
and how we might find meaning in it.
Part of our pleasure in these objects might be that mystery--
exoticism, you might call it.
We may not know why it was made, but we can still
find things to like, seeing it through the limited filter
of our own experience and enjoy guessing at its origins.
Let's look at this Nkisi n'kondi power figure,
made in the 19th century in the area that
is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
And if you haven't studied it, I dare you not
to think about who made it, how it was used, where it was kept,
what's inside of it.
If you fall into the camp of those
who think art should speak for itself, then
what do we do with an object such as this?
Dismiss it, because everything may not
be evident at first glance?
Whether you're standing in front of a grand history
painting whose story you don't remember well
or a Hudson River School painting that
seems to have no secrets to hide,
there is always contextual information you don't have.
Even considering this 2002 video work by Cory Arcangel.
If you didn't grow up playing Super Mario Bros,
it just doesn't really make sense.
There is a back story to everything.
Nothing is independent.
And everything is interrelated, the result
of a complex web of associations and actions and effects.
Whether or not you see it or want to see it is up to you.
One reason I like art is because I
want to find out what motivated the person or people to do
the thing.
And when I wonder about the why of an art generated by AI,
I'm either led back to a human person or to nothing.
We will see more and more art generated by AI, likely
with increasing sophistication.
And I mean, if machines and algorithms
begin to have personalities and quirks,
I might be interested in experiencing connection
with them through the art they make.
But in looking at AI generated work
through the lens of art history, I
see it as part of a long story of collaboration
between humans and technology.
While the line between the two has
become increasingly indistinct, I
believe it's in that murky territory
that we find compelling experiences and ideas.
What do you think about when you look at AI generated work?
Does it matter to you if a machine or a person made it?
Let's talk about it in the comments.
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