Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain. Image courtesy: Jure Kravanja (on the internet)
I had read about the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao back in 1999, for the 1st time. Avid and glutty about art, I read about it all, then met friends from Spain who spoke and spoke through many nights over their dry and drier as they came Rosa Wine. Yet, never had the good fortune to visit it. Some day I shall before I'm interred into the Hall of eternal sleep!
As Dan Brown's Ed Kirsch states in ORIGIN, Art is after all an abbreviation of Artificial. I'd go one step further and say it is an abbreviation of Artificial Reality. For... what do we project via art but an exaggerated juxtaposition of Reality!!! Or, realities. For... there are several realities. The reality of the original that inspired the artist. The reality of the artist's mentality at the time of creation. The reality of the work through its évolutionary process: here, its daily reality changes. The reality of its final state. The reality of the perceiver. Perhaps, the realities of the several perceivers. The reality of the socio-cultural spatio-temporality of the society in which it is beheld and perceived. Therefore, it posits the question: can art generated by an AI, any AI have artistic value or aesthetic relevance or societal value? Then, does that art belong to, as Langdon asks in the same book, the programmer or the computer/bot. I take this further... do we have to include the AI interface or the algorithm that generated it as further stakeholders?
Why are we boggled with this? It all started with a voice note from a fellow theatre practitioner ealy in the morning. He was responding to a blog post of mine I had shared the link to. The voice note: "Reminded of a line from AURANGAZEB (by Dr. Indira Parthasarathy), can one appreciate Taj Mahal on empty stomach!" That further led me to reflect: can art be created on empty stomachs? Quite the same thing that George Büchner in his Prefatory dig to his satire LEONCE AND LENA asks through two characters:
Alfieri: E la Fama? (And Fame?)
Gozzi: E la fame? (And hunger?)
Alfieri is Vittorio Alfieri and Gozzi is Carlo Gozzi, both Italian People of Letters. Check them on the internet for further read. While you're there, also look Quasimodo up! Onwards and upwards...
It is interesting how references shuttle across the 'synapse triggers' in response to one thought. This triggered interplay of ideas is what leads to creation and the process of creativity. If one has put in enough effort to also have read writings across cultures, it is a juicy, exciting journey. Dealing with Art in the age of GPT, I consciously use the term synapse triggers. As Natyashastra says, Yatho Hasta thatho Drishti, Yatho Drishti thatho Manah, Yatho Manah thatho Bhaava, Yatho Bhaava thatho Rasa. So, eventually the mind drives the creation. Now, what is a bot but an Artificial mind? However, it has been programmed by a human mind to think. Therefore, it may not be bootless to say an art created by an AI is a product of science and technology. When technology can drive sound, acoustic and lighting in theatre, why cannot or should not technology drive Art! Points to ponder as visual and performance arts enter the landscape of NFT.
The possibilities may not enthuse the orthodox. At least, we can rest assured with the anagnorisis that that artifical bot artist would still create art, even if they do not go hungry. As to whether a bot could appreciate Taj Mahal, well if it did in a human sense, that would be very very peripatetic!
Let me know your thoughts.
I had read about the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao back in 1999, for the 1st time. Avid and glutty about art, I read about it all, then met friends from Spain who spoke and spoke through many nights over their dry and drier as they came Rosa Wine. Yet, never had the good fortune to visit it. Some day I shall before I'm interred into the Hall of eternal sleep!
As Dan Brown's Ed Kirsch states in ORIGIN, Art is after all an abbreviation of Artificial. I'd go one step further and say it is an abbreviation of Artificial Reality. For... what do we project via art but an exaggerated juxtaposition of Reality!!! Or, realities. For... there are several realities. The reality of the original that inspired the artist. The reality of the artist's mentality at the time of creation. The reality of the work through its évolutionary process: here, its daily reality changes. The reality of its final state. The reality of the perceiver. Perhaps, the realities of the several perceivers. The reality of the socio-cultural spatio-temporality of the society in which it is beheld and perceived. Therefore, it posits the question: can art generated by an AI, any AI have artistic value or aesthetic relevance or societal value? Then, does that art belong to, as Langdon asks in the same book, the programmer or the computer/bot. I take this further... do we have to include the AI interface or the algorithm that generated it as further stakeholders?
Why are we boggled with this? It all started with a voice note from a fellow theatre practitioner ealy in the morning. He was responding to a blog post of mine I had shared the link to. The voice note: "Reminded of a line from AURANGAZEB (by Dr. Indira Parthasarathy), can one appreciate Taj Mahal on empty stomach!" That further led me to reflect: can art be created on empty stomachs? Quite the same thing that George Büchner in his Prefatory dig to his satire LEONCE AND LENA asks through two characters:
Alfieri: E la Fama? (And Fame?)
Gozzi: E la fame? (And hunger?)
Alfieri is Vittorio Alfieri and Gozzi is Carlo Gozzi, both Italian People of Letters. Check them on the internet for further read. While you're there, also look Quasimodo up! Onwards and upwards...
It is interesting how references shuttle across the 'synapse triggers' in response to one thought. This triggered interplay of ideas is what leads to creation and the process of creativity. If one has put in enough effort to also have read writings across cultures, it is a juicy, exciting journey. Dealing with Art in the age of GPT, I consciously use the term synapse triggers. As Natyashastra says, Yatho Hasta thatho Drishti, Yatho Drishti thatho Manah, Yatho Manah thatho Bhaava, Yatho Bhaava thatho Rasa. So, eventually the mind drives the creation. Now, what is a bot but an Artificial mind? However, it has been programmed by a human mind to think. Therefore, it may not be bootless to say an art created by an AI is a product of science and technology. When technology can drive sound, acoustic and lighting in theatre, why cannot or should not technology drive Art! Points to ponder as visual and performance arts enter the landscape of NFT.
The possibilities may not enthuse the orthodox. At least, we can rest assured with the anagnorisis that that artifical bot artist would still create art, even if they do not go hungry. As to whether a bot could appreciate Taj Mahal, well if it did in a human sense, that would be very very peripatetic!
Let me know your thoughts.
1 comment:
AI mavens and programmers argue that image generators draw inspiration from a larger palette of resources than humans, even trained artists. But are Midjourney or DALLE-E aware of the sentience of their art creation process viz., appreciative of their own creative process and what they are doing? Are they aware they are creating art?
Though AI programs combine existing information in new ways, they are still working with conventional datasets.
Going ahead, would making AI an “aware” digital entity be acceptable to the purists? The idea so far has been to not work towards making AI aware and capable of sentient thinking, as that would give it credible agency of its own, skirting Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.
What makes AI-generated art mediocre to the puristic eye, is to a good extent, also what drives the ethics-oriented control of it. That’s a necessary irony that comes with the territory. And, working on rehashing existing ideas, makes AI output more of mashup art, not real imagination, which thinks ahead into the future. Can AI inspire the human brain to imagine scenarios beyond its current creative output capacity?
Perhaps, the safeguards — some critics doubt we have enough skin in the game to weld these safeguards into the AI machine yet — which supposedly protect the gullible from AI-generated falsehood can also hobble AI from producing output superior to what the human brain can generate, no matter how many copyrighted novels/essays Microsoft and Google violate to “train” their AI programs.
Appreciation of bad art and oodles of lazy writing will increase with ChatGPT and be lapped up by a growing population which can’t differentiate fact from lies, and not critically trained to appreciate good art.
AI is faster than the human brain, but that doesn’t mean the hallucinations it produces are great masterworks available on tap.
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