MACHINES LEARNING ART • Sonya Rapoport • Vera Molnár • Alex
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US $30 The Global Journal of Prints and Ideas January – February 2019 Volume 8, Number 5 MACHINES LEARNING ART • SonYA RAPoPort • VerA MoLnÁr • ALex DoDGe • PAti HiLL • Anni ALbers TACitA DeAn & JULie MehretU • SUe Coe • KrAkow TrienniAL • The First AI-JUrieD Prix De Print • News UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS presents: Louise Bourgeois, Topiary: The Art of Improving Nature, 1998 Plate 5 from a portfolio of 9 drypoint and aquatint etchings on paper, edition of 28 39 ¼ x 27 ¾ in.; 99,7 x 70,5 cm Photo: Christopher Burke; © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, NY 22 JANUARY – 8 MARCH 2019 | OPENING RECEPTION: 1 FEBRUARY 2019 | 5–7PM DORRANCE HAMILTON HALL | UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS | PHILADELPHIA, PA MFA BOOK ARTS + PRINTMAKING bookprintmfa.uarts.edu January – February 2019 In This Issue Volume 8, Number 5 Editor-in-Chief Susan Tallman 2 Susan Tallman On Machine Learning Associate Publisher Douglas Dodds 3 Julie Bernatz Chance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers Production Editor Kevin Weil Grant D. Taylor 10 “JOB FROM MOLNAR”: Pioneering Advertising Manager Computer-Generated Prints Lydia Mullin Leslie Jones 15 Manuscript Editor The Personal is Computable: Prudence Crowther Sonya Rapoport Editor-at-Large Kate McQuillen 22 Catherine Bindman Sampling Ourselves: A Conversation with Alex Dodge Design Director Skip Langer Exhibition Reviews Catherine Daunt 28 Interlaced: Anni Albers at Alan Cristea and Tate Modern Jason Urban 31 Pati Hill’s Scanning Bed Romance Kate McCrickard 34 Tacita Dean and Julie Mehretu: 90 Monotypes for 90 Years Re’al Christian 37 Sue Coe: Graphic Resistance Paul Coldwell 40 Krakow Triennial 2018 Prix de Print, No. 33 42 Juried by VGGNet Progression (2018) by Patty deGrandpre News of the Print World 44 On the Cover: Sonya Rapoport, detail of Anasazi Series, Panel 1-A, Page 1 of 12 (1977), Prismacolor and pencil on found pre- printed perforated continuous-feed computer printout paper. Courtesy Estate of Sonya Rapoport. This Page: Alex Dodge, detail of Whisper in my ear and tell me softly (2018), oil on linen. Courtesy the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, NY. Art in Print 3500 N. Lake Shore Drive Suite 10A Chicago, IL 60657-1927 www.artinprint.org Art in Print is supported in part [email protected] by awards from the 1.844.ARTINPR (1.844.278.4677) National Endowment for the Arts. No part of this periodical may be published Art Works. without the written consent of the publisher. On Machine Learning By Susan Tallman he buzz is now deafening: labeled Some of these works take form as T“machine learning,” or “artificial screenprints or lithographs, while others Art in Print intelligence” (AI), or just “smart-[insert were produced by computer-controlled object here],” the idea that computers are pen plotters or gussied up typewriters. All Art in Print is a not-for-profit interacting with the real world in ways are at least potentially “exactly repeatable 501(c)(3) corporation, founded we had thought distinctively “human” pictorial statements” (to use Ivins’s func- in 2010. has swelled to a sloppy, hyperbolic din. tional description of the print). Today’s Christie’s fall sale of an “AI painting” is profound interpenetration of digital and Board Members representative: the price was ridiculous physical realms is brought home in the and the picture was ugly, so the click-bait work of Alex Dodge, interviewed here Julie Bernatz was irresistible. But the event did little by Kate McQuillen, who makes paint- Catherine Bindman to clarify what is interesting or valuable ings using the Paleolithic print technique Renée Bott or provocative about the current state of of stencil; the stencils, however, are cut Nicolas Collins human-machine relations. by computer-controlled systems work- Thomas Cvikota The implications of machines learn- ing from digital files to replicate images Bel Needles ing, rather than just executing instruc- developed as virtual 3D renderings of Robert Ross tions, are profound, though the basic idea invented objects under wraps. Antoine Rouillé-d’Orfeuil is pretty simple: rather than telling the Artists’ fascination with impersonal Marc Schwartz computer to, say, move a pen 2 cm, turn interventions has roots beyond the digital Susan Tallman 90° and repeat three times, you show it of course: the Anni Albers retrospectives lots of examples of squares, ask it to draw in London, reviewed here by Catherine Editorial Board one, and feed it digital doggy treats until Daunt, called attention to the connec- Richard Axsom it gets it right. (Needless to say, God and tions between weaving and algorithmic Jay A. Clarke the devil both lurk in the details). Most of design principles; and Jason Urban writes Paul Coldwell us use computers to improve execution— about Pati Hill’s photocopies of the 1970s Stephen Coppel we want them to do what we tell them and 80s, which bear witness to a threshold Faye Hirsch to do, but we also want them to change moment in technological poetics, before Jane Kent “teh” into “the” without asking. The big— the entire world moved onto our desk- David Kiehl potentially existential—question is this: tops. (In other reviews, Kate McCrickard Evelyn Lincoln how much “without asking” are we okay looks at Tacita Dean and Julie Mehretu’s Andrew Raftery with? celebration of Marian Goodman in Paris; Christian Rümelin It’s a question artists have been asking Re’al Christian considers the ambitions Gillian Saunders since computers were the size of city bus- and effects of Sue Coe’s visual arguments ses, and it is the focus of this issue of Art in against meat; and Paul Coldwell reports For further information visit Print. We look at artists who have invited on the Krakow Triennial.) artinprint.org/about-art-in-print/. machines into their work, not to make Finally, to considering the question sharper lines or slicker gradients, but to of machine intelligence and aesthetic share decision-making with an intelli- response from the position of viewer gence not their own. Douglas Dodds pro- rather than creator, this issue’s Prix de vides an indispensible survey of how and Print competition has been judged by a why artists have chosen to share power custom-built AI program whose aesthetic with machines from the early 1960s sense was honed through immersion in onward. Grant D. Taylor writes about back issues of Art in Print and the deci- Vera Molnár, who began using computers sion-making of the 32 previous, human, in Paris in 1968 as a means of extending jurors. her investigations into aesthetic percep- How much “without asking” are we tion and “the transition from visual order okay with? In Dodds’s article, Jean-Pierre to disorder.” Leslie Jones takes us to the Hébert speaks for most humans when he Bay Area, where, some 35 years before explains, “I liked Chance to give me sur- Facebook, Sonya Rapoport recognized prises, but only pleasant ones. So I tamed the computer as a social phenomenon, Chance, constrained it.” both in terms of its symbolic stature with the STEM cells of our culture, and as an Susan Tallman is Editor-in-Chief instrument for analyzing people. of Art in Print. 2 Art in Print January – February 2019 Chance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers By Douglas Dodds Charles Csuri, Random War (1968), lithograph, after a computer-generated plotter drawing. V&A Circ.775-1969. ©The Artist / Victoria and Albert Museum. pening at London’s Institute of The Victoria and Albert Museum resented in the museum as characteristic O Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1968, acquired some of its first examples of aberrations.”3 “Cybernetic Serendipity” was one of the computer-generated imagery as a result Three of these prints featured in a first international exhibitions devoted of the show: a set of seven lithographs V&A show I c0-curated recently, entitled to the relationship between the com- of works in the exhibition—two by the “Chance and Control: Art in the Age of puter and the arts. Artists, mathemati- Computer Technique Group (CTG) from Computers,” inspired by the 50th anni- cians, engineers, composers and poets all Japan, plus one each by Charles Csuri, versary of “Cybernetic Serendipity” and presented work in what is now seen as a William Fetter, Maughan S. Mason, Don- the founding of the Computer Arts Soci- landmark event in the history of digital ald K. Robbins and Kerry Strand. The ety soon afterwards. The two nouns in art. The curator, Jasia Reichardt, wrote: complete set was purchased in 1969 for our main title—“chance” and “control”— just five pounds, though the Museum’s refer back to the rather more elegant People who would never have put files demonstrate that some V&A cura- title of the original ICA exhibition, with pencil to paper, or brush to canvas, tors were reluctant to accept the prints, its evocation of happy accidental discov- have started making images ...which including the then-head of the Prints ery on the one hand and what Norbert approximate and often look identical and Drawings department.2 One com- Weiner called “the scientific study of con- to what we call art and put in public mented, “I am far from convinced about trol and communication in the animal galleries. This is the single most impor- their aesthetic validity—I would support and the machine” on the other.4 tant revelation of this exhibition.1 [the] contention that they should be rep- The first section of the V&A display Art in Print January – February 2019 3 Left: A. Michael Noll, Ninety Parallel Sinusoids with Linearly Increasing Period (1964–5), photographic print of a computer-generated image. V&A E.34-2011 ©The Artist / Victoria and Albert Museum.