Duchamp Meets Turing: Art, Modernism, Posthuman (original) (raw)
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2019
Intelligence Everywhere: What artistic explorations can tell us through and about technological development presented on Sept 18 2019 during the Humanities and Public Life Conference at Dawson College, Montréal, Canada Recent developments in machine learning and what John McCarthy has named artificial intelligence in 1956 have repeatedly been portrayed in the media as competing with human creativity. Binary narratives that (narcissistically) anthropomorphize and present technological advancements as either miraculous or antagonistic spread fear and fascination amongst the public. Machines, some threaten, will take your job as an artist, a lawyer, a taxi driver, a doctor, an accountant, and govern us … In this presentation I wish to draw a historical lineage between ideas that were at the roots of the British branch of cybernetics comparing and contrasting the worldview that underlined it with the approach taken by the founders of the Artificial Intelligence project in 1956. I wish to establish the link between the cybernetic worldview and the recent developments in machine learning that we commonly refer to as Artificial Intelligence. (AI) These powerful discoveries are currently used to generate images, natural language, soundscapes and videos that can be mistaken to have been produced by people. This has pushed some to declare that the machines were themselves creative. I will argue that while the tools do display what N.Katherine Hayles calls non-conscious cognition, a process that is found everywhere in nature, creativity, in the realm of art, is a concept rooted in the self-reflexive sense-making ability of the person orchestrating it as well as in the social, cultural and political context in which it is being examined. Presenting creativity from the point of view of the art world, I will argue that the definition of art does not lie solely in the formal aesthetics of the object produced but is a shifting culturally constructed concept that is by no means negated by machine “imagination” or “creativity”. The notion of authorship in relation with automation in the creative process have been explored thoroughly in the realm of art ever since, for example, Marcel Duchamp presented his readymade, Walter Benjamin published his famous text in 1937 and Roland Barth examined aspects of the topic in 1967. Early cybernetic prototypes that displayed cognitive behaviours as well as artworks that use automation in their creative process will be presented as well as a selection of recent art practises that explore and comment on the use of statistical models or what Hunger calls “enhanced pattern recognition” systems such as artificial neural networks and adversarial neural networks. (Hunger 2017) These artworks often present advanced technical tools as one component of a network (Latour) /agencement (Deleuze) in which humans interact with them in complex and intricate ways. Through the examination of a selection of projects by artists from various backgrounds, such as the recent work and writings by indigenous artists as well as local and international artists, I wish to point to some of the shortcomings they bring to light as well as how they engage us into some much-needed reflection about the technologies we generate and how they hold the potential to redefine us and the environment.
Turing's Titanic Machine? Embodied and Disembodied Computing at the Turing Centenary
It is in the nature of things that 1912 is generally more remembered for the sinking of the “unsinkable” Titanic than it is for the far more world-changing event: the birth of Alan Mathison Turing in a London nursing home on a Sunday in June of that year. The Turing Centenary presents a timely opportunity for us to remember the startling depth of impact of Turing’s universal machine over the last 75 years. In this brief review I examine challenges to its continued primacy as a model for computation in daily practice and in the wider universe. In doing this, the Titanic analogy is surprisingly useful, even apt from some points of view. It reminds us of the achievements of science and engineering, and its precarious coexistence with the often surprising unpredictability of events in nature.
Artificial intelligence (A.I.) and Art
Artificial intelligence (A.I.) and Art, 2022
Technosphere is characterized by a switch from nature into a new, machine operated, realm of technology. What humanity is facing in its modernity is the transition from a human to a posthuman state of rule which is run by artificial intelligence (A.I.) and performed by artificial life (A.L.). In his work “The Inhuman”, Jean-Francois Lyotard reflects on the dominance of a new logic of techno-science over mankind. That notion binds the idea of the end of mankind as we know it. Technology is not neutral, it’s not simply a way of transmitting information in the service of mankind, it’s more than that, technology forms its new own being and with it a new technological language. Contemporary society is no longer determined by the concept of the spirit, or what Walter Benjamin calls “aura”, but rather by the logic of techno-science in its total rule over the entire space and time of the world. With the technologies of the new digital era a new question arises in the field of philosophy of art which until their appearance was considered as sublime. Artificial intelligence (A.I.) and artificial life (A.L.), through the connection of biotechnology and computing machines, appear as a new immaterial creation of life. Their space of action is virtual space, their time of action is instantaneous
1999
We outline four types of machine that informed Turing's investigations: the subversion machine, the improving machine, the perfect machine and the dysfunctional machine. We show how each deals with the issue of dysfunction, and argue that in design the ways that machines do not work can be just as illuminating as how they do. In this investigation we call on the reflections of the surrealists who sought the incongruity of object and context as the means to understanding the anarchical play of design.
This paper focuses on explicit attempts at developing artificial intelligence in the production of art that generate outcomes similar to, or even technically superseding, the works of human artists. We aim at revealing the underlying discourses that equate art production with transformation of information, artists with input/output systems, and artistic creativity with an unlimited and autonomous generation of art-like outcomes. As a point of departure, we begin from an exposition of Margaret Boden’s account of creativity and proceed by examining different arguments to the effect that computers can be truly creative, primarily those offered by Boden (2004, 2010). We question what the assumptions, operative in the discourse on artificial or computational creativity, entail. AI-agents can produce creative outcomes because they implement our best models of creativity. By implementing these models, however, AI-agents evidence a particular understanding of what art is and what constitutes artistic production. This understanding does not fully conform to how contemporary artistic practices are perceived and valued. As a result, we argue, better models to frame artistic AI and computational creativity are needed to fully appreciate the developments in this field and their articulation within the existing art world.