Medium or Monster?
So here we are. First our lives, then our jobs and now our culture. What is next on the cyborg-take-over-war-path? As an artist that works in tech, my artificial intelligence Doomsday Clock moves forward by about a minute everyday and that looks to be speeding up.
On October 25, a painting went up for auction at Christie’s that could have colossal impact on the future of art history and machine learning. The painting was expected to sell for up to $10,000, it was sold for $435,000.
French art collective Obvious (http://obvious-art.com/), through their exploration of how art and artificial intelligence can work together, developed an algorithm which would create a portrait. The computer was fed two data sets. One, 15,000 portraits from the last 600 years which it would use to develop the piece of art and the other, a data set it would use to decide if this was made by a human or a robot. The final product would be the work that fools the computer into thinking it was made by a human.
A Portrait of Edmond Belamy
min max Ex[log(D(x))] + Ez[log(1-D(G(z)))]
A Portrait of Edmond Belamy, which is officially by “min max Ex[log(D(x))] + Ez[log(1-D(G(z)))]”, is surprisingly human in its production. Human, in the sense that the algorithm decided the work needed to be contemporary for it to make it past its human=true/false test. This painting is unique because all of the art that it produced before did not make it past the human test (because of course a computer can make something look realistic). The piece leaves itself in a surprisingly modern, unfinished and off center state. It is abstract at a human level of understanding abstraction.
The obvious question, well, is it art? “Why does an artist create art?” seems like a more logical question to “what is art”. Art has to be motivated into creation. An idle computer does not doodle (and if IBM’s Watson did, then we should be worried). So the thought path is more about the creation of a new medium. New technology has always impacted the direction art history. Monet and the Impressionists were influenced by the the mass adoption of the camera and the soon to be obsolescence of realistic landscapes. Their new style of art affected generations of artists to explore new ways to create. Art is what it is today because of these leaders.
As our lives become more and more intertwined with machines, we can’t exactly be surprised when things like this happen. It is equally exciting and terrifying that there are very few things that we will be able to hold onto as a species. This new medium will have repercussions in the art world for a long time, and it is still in its infant stages. We are at the edge of a new era, or one step closer to the singularity.
Szymon is an account manager at Freelancer.com and a Vancouver artist.
You can check out his upcoming show False Idols at The Space, An Art Gallery on November 17th, 2018.