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The Machine As Artist As Myth

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The Machine As Artist As Myth arts Article The Machine as Artist as Myth Andreas Broeckmann Institute of Philosophy and Sciences of Art (IPK), Leuphana University, 21335 Lüneburg, Germany; [email protected] Received: 4 January 2019; Accepted: 14 February 2019; Published: 20 February 2019 Abstract: The essay proposes an art–historical contextualisation of the notion of the “machine as artist”. It argues that the art–theoretical tropes raised by current speculations on artworks created by autonomous technical systems have been inherent to debates on modern and postmodern art throughout the 20th century. Moreover, the author suggests that the notion of the machine derives from a mythological narrative in which humans and technical systems are rigidly figured as both proximate and antagonistic. The essay develops a critical perspective onto this ideological formation and elucidates its critique in a discussion of a recent series of artworks and a text by US American artist Trevor Paglen. Keywords: machine; art; art history; myth; modernism; artificial intelligence; artificialism; machine realism 1. Machine Art “Mechanical nature derives from human nature but will soon overtake it” (Versari 2009). When the young second generation Futurist, Fillìa, wrote this in 1927, he was at the helm of a movement that began to think about the possibility of machines becoming independent agents no longer controlled by humans, but that would instead steer human behaviour. “The people whose sensibility today doesn’t adhere to modern life will find themselves weakened, nostalgic, and pessimistic, that is, practically useless, in the mechanical and intransigent organization of tomorrow” (ibid.). A few years earlier, in 1922, Fillìa’s fellow Futurist, Enrico Prampolini, had yet been less affirmative of the role of machine agency in “the new aesthetic of The Machine”. Somewhat vaguely, Prampolini wrote: “The machine marks the rhythm of human psychology and beats the time for our spiritual exaltations. Therefore it is inevitable and consequent to the evolution of the plastic arts of our day” (Prampolini 1922). This inevitability became the conceptual core for an exhibition, “Machine Art”, that Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1934. The show contained only objects from US American industrial production, polemically claiming the aesthetic superiority of designs that were determined only by functionality, rather than by artistic styles or human intention. “Good machine art”, as Barr put it in his introductory text for the catalogue, “is entirely independent of painting, sculpture and architecture” (qu. Broeckmann 2016). These instances remind us that the trope of the “machine as artist” is not germane to the age of computers and Artificial Intelligence. The idea of a supersession of humans by technics, in art and other areas of human life, runs through the 20th century and is an inherent part of a modernist understanding of technics. Another aspect of this mythological dimension of technics is that the presumed cataclysm of a machine takeover is always imminent (Fillìa says, “soon”), and that it is tied to the concern about an existential threat for humans. In Alfred Barr’s words, elsewhere in the catalogue introduction: “Machines literally multiply our difficulties and point our doom. [ ... ] We must assimilate the machine aesthetically as well as economically. Not only must we bind Frankenstein—but we must make him beautiful” (ibid.). The Italian, third generation Futurist Bruno Munari would, a few years later, become Arts 2019, 8, 25; doi:10.3390/arts8010025 www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Arts 2019, 8, 25 2 of 10 the first artist to build humorous, dysfunctional machine sculptures, macchine inutile, eager to counter the unforgiving rationality of functionalism. His motivation was a technosceptical concern similar to that voiced by Barr. In his 1938 “Manifesto del Macchinismo”, Munari warns of the dangers of an all-powerful machine whose slaves people will become—“in a few years’ time”. Munari continues: “The machine of today is a monster! The machine must become a work of art! We shall discover the art of machines!” (ibid.).1 In our own time, at the beginning of the 21st century, the impact of technology on contemporary art, and on culture in general, is finally becoming a topic of general public attention. At this moment, even for the specialised technical field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning,2 every other week, a new exhibition, conference, funding program, or publication project is announced—think of exhibitions like, “I am here to learn: On Machinic Interpretations of the World” (Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2018), “Machines Are Not Alone: A Machinic Trilogy” (Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, 2018), “Entangled Realities: Living with Artificial Intelligence” (House of Electronic Arts, Basel, 2019), and “AI: More Than Human” (Barbican Centre, London, 2019); the workshop “The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2018), or a panel on “art created by AI systems” (CAA Conference, New York City, 2019). Key players of the contemporary art world, like the artist Hito Steyerl (The City of Broken Windows, Castello di Rivoli, 2018) or Pierre Huyghe (UUmwelt, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2018), elicit further attention to the topic through their recent projects. The art–historical perspective taken here seeks to underscore the relevance and urgency of a critical engagement with such technological developments. It may help to tune the conceptual framework of such a critique by pointing out that, for instance, the recent stunt of the Artificial Intelligence-based “Next Rembrandt” painting was made possible by decades of art–historical and technical research on the painter’s works in the Rembrandt Research Project and could not easily be replicated for other historical artists.3 Moreover, the topic of a concrete “machine authorship” of paintings has been virulent ever since, in the early 1970s, Harold Cohen, started his research on the computer-based cognition and creation system AARON. When we think of the status of Duchamp’s Readymades and Rotoreliefs, or Warhol’s Factory, or the different strands of Generative Art, we realise that questions about the artistic validity of technical products (and reproductions) form part of the bedrock of art theoretical reflection in the last 50 years.4 The subversion of notions like artistic intention and artistic genius is constitutive of contemporary art discourses, and it has been understood throughout the 20th century to be the result of both artistic volition and of technical developments, as evidenced by Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the destruction of the artwork’s aura, in his essay of 1936 on “The Artwork in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction”. Hence, some of these questions are at least as old as the discourses on photography and on modern printing techniques, discourses that date back to the 19th century. There is no need for panic. 1 Cf. Broeckmann, Machine Art, for an extensive treatment of the role of machines in the visual arts of the 20th century, as well as for specific aspects of machine aesthetics. 2 Terms like “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” are problematic, not least due to the mixing of both descriptive and metaphorical uses of such concepts as “intelligence” and “learning”; since in this text, I only tackle the notion of the “machine” in any detail, the words are used here with upper-case letters in order to indicate their problematic, ideological status. 3 The Rembrandt Research Project (1968–2011) initiated a radical sifting of works that had previously been ascribed to the Dutch 17th-century painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn; for a summary treatment of the project, cf. (White 2015). This thoroughly analysed corpus no doubt provided crucial material for the training of the pattern recognition systems of the “Next Rembrandt” project. Another recent example is the AI-generated image, Portrait of Edmond Belamy (2018), by the French artist group Obvious, cf. http://obvious-art.com (accessed on 8 February 2019). 4 Cf. also Cornelia Sollfrank’s work on the digital multiplication of Warhol’s Flowers; cf. “copyright © 2004, cornelia sollfrank”. In Cornelia Sollfrank, net.art generator. Nürnberg, Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2004; cf. also Sarah Cook: “What would Artificial Intelligence find aesthetically pleasing? The burning question of generative art and its audience”. In (Sollfrank 2004, pp. 146–55). Arts 2019, 8, 25 3 of 10 2. The Myth of the Artist The notion of the “machine as artists” provokes a reflection on what is “an artist”, and on the notion of “the machine”. While I want to deal with the latter more extensively in a moment, I can for the former refer to the text by Aaron Hertzmann (“Can Computers Create Art?”, Hertzmann 2018), elsewhere in this issue, which presents a detailed discussion of the question, “Could a piece of computer software ever be widely credited as the author of an artwork?” Hertzmann emphasises the instrumental function of computers, programs, and algorithms for people who make art, and insists that art is a social activity, an activity of social (thus human) agents. Hertzmann’s argument is based on a mostly transhistorical understanding of “art”. It would benefit from a more critical understanding of the notion of “the artist” and a consideration of how this notion transforms in different historical and discursive settings. “Art” has been many different things in different
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