Converging worlds
This article started out as a deep dive into the use of AI in art: examining the possibilities that AI opens up for artists, the common objections to the whole idea of AI art, and what I have found personally using some of the AI tools now available.
That will be an article for another time, however, because what I found while I was writing was a much more fundamental. I have found my voice. And I have found a community.
Having made the decision a couple of years ago to take doing art more seriously, I have been on a journey of experiments that have led to a rather magical place. A place I never could have imagined even just a year ago.
I have found myself at the convergence of two of the worlds that I had previously kept separate in my life: art and technology. I have had the job title of software engineer for over 20 years now. I have been a artist (practising or not) all of my life. But for the past six months, I have been a “crypto-artist” where my love of art and exploration and my years of experience and curiosity about technology have come together.
That is where the connection to the original article about AI came in, actually. I had been exploring ways in which AI is being used to assist in the creation of art, as well as AI being used to generate art in itself. The work of pioneers of this field opens up more questions than it answers and I find this very fertile ground for creating art. Seeking answers to those questions leads me to a better understanding of my own art, and Art (with a capital A) in general.
What is a “crypto-artist” then? I don’t think there is any agreed definition. Nor do I think there should be an exclusive definition. To me, that is part of the beauty of crypto-art: anyone who wants to be can be included. (That feels right for a decentralised system like the blockchains crypto-art are built on, or reference. And that is also another article to write in future!) For me, being a crypto artist means being a part of the community of crypto artists and publishing my digital art on a blockchain like Ethereum or Crea.
It is a fast-paced world where things happen quickly and radical collaboration is often embedded into the way things work. In just the past couple of weeks I’ve been involved in an Art Gallery Tour of the Cryptovoxels virtual world that was conceived, organised and implemented by a small group of collaborators on Cent (another distributed platform built on the Ethereum blockchain), and helped out with the organisation of a ‘virtual gallery’ (again in Cryptovoxels) that paralleled a real life art show in Los Angeles. (Another instance of world — real and virtual — converging!)
Seeing artists who program their artworks, or write the code of the tools they use to create their art, is such a thrill for me and reminds that all parts of the creative process are valuable, and that there is art in all of them.
Which brings me back to AI Art. With quotes like this from American Scientific:
I started to think about all of the tools (both mechanical, software, and traditional) that artists have used and are using. A good friend of mine is an artist who like to make his own tools as well as use whatever tools are available to him. To me, this is just what artists do. Is the tool used the determiner of whether something is art or not?
Each person, I think, needs to find their own answer.
There are a number of artists or collectives who have already written more than I will about what AI Art is, giving background and context. I encourage you to read some of the following:
- A naive yet educated perspective on Art and Artificial Intelligence
- A timeline of AI Art
- Unanswered questions about AI
And these are just a few!
I see AI as a possibility generating machine. I select the input, I select from what is produced as output, I can refine by ‘gene-editing’ for the traits that I am particularly interested in, I can ‘cross-breed’ images to combine two lines of images possessing different traits. All to get a final image that I am satisfied with.
Is all AI art ‘Art’? No, I don’t think so. In the same way that all photos that get posted on various social media aren’t ‘Art’ either. But does that mean that photos can’t be ‘Art’? I don’t think anyone but Gore Vidal would claim that!
For half a century photography has been the “art form” of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? to the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? To the law of averages? — Gore Vidal
We are having the same conversation, with the same questions, today regarding AI Art.
What do you think?
