State of the Art: A.I. through the (artificial) artist’s eye

This paper builds on the premise that art has a significant role to play in engaging with and exploring new technologies and in contributing to interdisciplinary conversations. Artists have often been pioneers in reflecting upon social and technological transformations by creating work that makes explicit the dangers, but also the exciting possibilities ushered in by innovation. After having, albeit briefly, traced the history of art engagement with technology (computer/net-art, generative art), the paper will focus on AI-art, now defined as GAI-art, to understand whether artificial intelligence is “set to become art’s next medium?” The question was prompted by the sale at Christie’s in October 2018 for $432,500 of a portrait entitled Edmund de Belamy , a work created by an algorithm called Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The source code used by the Paris based art collective Obvious (borrowed from AI researcher/artist Robbie Barrat) to create the “artwork” triggered a debate as to the authenticity, authorship and ethics of using GAN to produce AI-art. The paper will contribute to such debate by exploring also the implications of systems more sophisticated than GAN – which seem to be able to act as “autonomous artificial artists” and produce new styles of art – and by showcasing the works of some of the most representative machine vision researchers/artists – Anna Ridler and Mario Klingeman, among others. AI artworks raise major philosophical questions, the meaning to be human in a hyper-connected world and the true nature of human creativity. In fact conceptualising AI through the artificial artist’s eye might even challenge our understanding of what it means to be human.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Anna Notaro

Conference

Publication date: July 2020

Publication date (Print): July 2020

Pages: 322-328

Affiliations

[0001]Duncan of Jordanstone

College of Art & Design

University of Dundee, Dundee, UK

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVA2020.58

SO-VID: fbb70834-5dcc-42b8-9c8b-ee4aca78ba5d

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of EVA London 2020

Conference acronym: EVA 2020

Conference number: 30

Conference location: London

Conference date: 6th July – 9th July 2020

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: AI and the Arts: Artificial Imagination

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVA2020.58

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

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L Floridi 2018 Semantic Capital: Its Nature, Value, and Curation Philos. Technol 31 481 497 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0335-1 16 March 2020
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C Garcia 2016 Harold Cohen and AARON – a 40 year collaboration https://computerhistory.org/blog/harold-cohen-and-aaron-a-40-year-collaboration/?key=harold-cohen-and-aaron-a-40-year-collaboration 11 March 2020
G Kogan 2019a Artist in the Cloud https://medium.com/@genekogan/artist-in-the-cloud-8384824a75c7 16 March 2020
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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] R Allen 2020 AI Will Be the Art Movement of the 21^st Century Quartz https://qz.com/1023493/ai-will-be-the-art-movement-of-the-21st-century/ 1 March 2020

[2] J Bailey 2018 AI Just Got Awesome Artnome https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/3/29/ai-art-just-got-awesome 3 March 2020

[3] J Bailey 2020 The Tools Of Generative Art Art in America https://www.artnews.com/art-inamerica/features/generative-art-tools-flash-processing-neural-networks-1202674657/?fbclid=IwAR3ZySihwq2-dAw_8NjysCOEnIyWf1ogJnfmoiolLG9oigq0JmIXGasEfg 2 March 2020

[4] R Boddington 2019 Anna Ridler uses AI to turn 10,000 tulips into a video controlled by bitcoin https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/anna-ridler-digital-art-280619#.XRsI2CWsL4Y.twitter 15 March 2020

[5] M. A Boden 2010 Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise OUP Oxford

[6] I Bogost 2019 The AI-Art Gold Rush is Here https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/ai-created-art-invades-chelsea-gallery-scene/584134/ 3 March 2020

[7] L Caplan 2020 The Social Conscience of Generative Art ArtNews https://www.artnews.com/art-inamerica/features/max-bense-gustav-metzger-generative-art-1202674265 7 March 2020

[8] J Carstensen 2018 all turtles, The New Master of AI created ‘Painting’ https://www.allturtles.com/2018/11/16/the-new-master-of-ai-created-painting/ 4 March 2020

[9] Christie’s 2018 Is artificial intelligence set to become art’s next medium? https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-one-a-machine-9332-1.aspx 11 March 2020

[10] Christie’s 2019 A conversation between spirituality and technology https://www.christies.com/features/Martha-Fiennesand-Salma-Hayek-on-Yugen-9431-3.aspx 1 March 2020

[11] K CizekW UricchioS Wolozin 2019 Part 6: Media Co-Creation with Non Human Systems https://wip.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/collective-wisdom-part-6 10 March 2020

[12] M Du Sautoy 2019 The Creativity Code 4th Estate, London

[13] A ElgammalB LuiM ElhoseinyM Mazzone 2017 CAN: Creative Adversarial Networks, Generating "Art" by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07068 15 March 2020

[14] L Floridi 2018 Semantic Capital: Its Nature, Value, and Curation Philos. Technol 31 481 497 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0335-1 16 March 2020

[15] P Galanter 2019 Artificial Intelligence and Problems in Generative Art Theory. Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2019), London, UK, 8–11 July 2019 http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/EVA2019.22 5 March 2020

[16] C Garcia 2016 Harold Cohen and AARON – a 40 year collaboration https://computerhistory.org/blog/harold-cohen-and-aaron-a-40-year-collaboration/?key=harold-cohen-and-aaron-a-40-year-collaboration 11 March 2020

[17] G Kogan 2019a Artist in the Cloud https://medium.com/@genekogan/artist-in-the-cloud-8384824a75c7 16 March 2020

[18] G Kogan 2019b The Spirit of Decentralization https://medium.com/@genekogan/the-spirit-of-decentralization-25b1ce41d4b5 16 March 2020

[19] A Notaro 2009 Reality is in the performance: intersecting cinema, technology and the body Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media 15 http://blogs.arts.unimelb.edu.au/refractory/category/browse-past-volumes/volume-15/ 8 March 2020

[20] C Nugent 2018 The Painter Behind These Artworks Is an AI Program. Do They Still Count as Art? Time https://time.com/5357221/obvious-artificial-intelligence-art/ 2 March 2020

[21] Obvious 2018 Obvious Explained Medium https://medium.com/@hello.obvious/ai-the-rise-ofa-new-art-movement-f6efe0a51f2e 3 March 2020

[22] C Sollfrank 2004 net.art Generator Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg

[23] C Sollfrank 2012 Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property – A practice-led Investigation into the Increasingly Conflicting Relationship between Copyright and Art PhD Thesis University of Dundee 2012

[24] J Vincent 2018 How Three French Students Used Borrowed Code To Put The First AI Portrait In Christie’s The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-art-portrait-auction-christies-belamy-obvious-robbie-barrat-gans 2 March 2020

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