The Authorship of Generative Art
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Reference
Adrian Ward, Geoff Cox: The Authorship of Generative Art. In: Generative Art 1999.
DOI
Abstract
The concept of value is traditionally bestowed on a work of art when it is seen to be unique and irreproducible, thereby granting it authenticity. Think of a famous painting: only the original canvas commands genuinely high prices.
Digital artwork is not valued in the same way. It can be copied infinitely and there is therefore a corresponding crisis of value. It has been argued that under these conditions of the dematerialised artwork, it is process that becomes valued. In this way, the process of creation and creativity is valued in place of authenticity, undermining conventional notions of authorship.
It is possible to correlate many of these creative processes into instructions. However, to give precise instructions on the construction of a creative work is a complex, authentic and intricate process equivalent to conventional creative work (and is therefore not simply a question of 'the death of the author'). This paper argues that to create ‘generative’ systems is a rigorous and intricate procedure; to have a machine write poetry for ten years would not generate creative music, but the process of getting the machine to do so would certainly register an advanced form of creativity. Moreover, the output from generative systems should not be valued simply as an endless, infinite series of resources but as a system.
When a programmer develops a generative system, they are engaged in a creative act. Programming is no less an artform than painting is a technical process. By analogy, the mathematical value pi can be approximated as 3.14159265, but a more thorough and accurate version can be stored as the formula used to calculate it. In the same way, it is more complete to express creativity formulated as code, which can then be executed to produce the results we desire. Rather like using Leibnitz's set of symbols to represent a mathematical formula, artists can now choose to represent creativity as computer programs (Harold Cohen’s Aaron, a computer program that creates drawings is a case in point).
By programming computers to undertake creative instructions, this paper will argue that more expansive traces of creativity are being developed that suitably merge artistic subjectivity with technical form. It is no longer necessary to be able to render art as a final tangible medium, but instead it is more desirable to program computers to be creative by proxy.
[The paper refers to Autoshop software, available from http://autoshop.signwave.co.uk]
Extended Abstract
Bibtex
Used References
[1] This is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Artwork in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ (written in 1935/36), in Illuminations, London: Fontana 1992.
[2] Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image-Music-Text, London: Penguin 1982, p.146.
[3] This is paraphrasing Foucault, who writes: ‘Rather we should re-examine the empty space left by the author’s disappearance; we should attentively examine, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void; we should await the fluid functions released by this disappearance.’ Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in, Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p.128. On the removal of the Author, Barthes says: ‘(... the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all levels the Author is absent).... The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after.’ Barthes, op cit.,p.145. Furthermore, it has become a postmodern truism to state that ‘... the artist invents nothing, that he or she only uses, manipulates, displaces, reformulates, repositions what history has provided.’ Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, MIT Press p.71.
[4] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Harper Collins Publishers: New York 1996.
[5] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Understanding Brecht, London: Verso 1992, p.98; first presented in 1934, at the institute for the study of Fascism, Paris; Benjamin argues that social relations are determined by the relations of production and therefore progressive artists should try to transform those relations. Note: a popular alternative view to describe this is as a return to artisanship.
[6] Details on what Eduardo Kac calls ‘transgenic’ works can be found at http://www.ekac.org/transgenicindex.html Kac’s Genesis was commissioned by Ars Electronica 1999 and presented online and at the O.K. Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, from September 4 to 19, 1999. Also see, ‘Transgenic Art’, first published in Leonardo Electronic, Volume 6, Number 11, 1998.
[7] Kevin Kelly, ‘Genetic images’, in Wired, 2.09. http://www.wired.com/wired/2.09/features/sims.html, 26 August 1998. See also, Out of Control for more speculation.
[8] Barthes famously claimed ‘... the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’, Ibid., p.148.
[9] This refers to Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term ‘Reproduction’ that connects cultural phenomena firmly to the structural characteristics of a society, and shows how the culture produced by this structure in turn helps to maintain it, in Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Richard Nice, Tom Bottomore, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London: Sage 1990.
[10] Tony Blair, the UK Prime Minister is quoted as having said that ‘I believe we are now in the middle of a second revolution, defined in part by new information technology, but also by creativity’ and estimated to be worth £50 billion to the economy, in The Guardian newspaper, 22 July 1997.
[11] For more information, the Free Software Foundation’s website is http://www.fsf.org/
[12] Danny O'Brien, ‘Some Past and Future Clichés Regarding Linux’ in Mute Magazine, Issue 12, 1999.
[13] Andre Spierings, ‘You can't spell artifice without A-R-T’, http://hyperreal.webjump.com also, ‘The Autonomous Artist in Theory and Practice’ http://home.internex.net.au/~omgang/auto/TheAutonomusArtist.html (sic)
[14] The Guardian newspaper’s headline of 25 October 1999 carried the story that a US biotechnology company (Celera) was seeking to patent segments of the human genetic code. This goes against the British-led efforts to negotiate an Anglo-American accord to ban patents; to publish the code for each gene within 24 hours of its discovery (rather like the principles of ‘Open source’) thus making it freely available to the benefit of the world-wide scientific community as a whole (e.g. to tackle diseases and so on). In patent law, discoveries in nature are not seen as inventions; the counterclaim is that discoveries should be subject to intellectual property rights.
[15] Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, in Linda Nicholson, ed. Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge 1990, p.219.
Links
Full Text
http://www.generativeart.com/on/cic/99/0399.htm
