The Artist's Machine

Arcu is an artificial curator, a computer program created by artist Tillmann Ohm. “The Artist’s Machine” is a computational research project developed to establish the historic background of the expert system’s special field of machine art. This generated book provides insight into Arcu’s self- gained knowledge.From researching topic-relevant literature, detecting semantic structures in hundreds of papers and books, to finally generating the publication’s chapters with images and paraphrased text citations, every step in the process has been performed automatically, initiated by a simple input phrase.

Can Machines Be Artists? A Deweyan Response in Theory and Practice

To speak comfortably of the machine artist (as outlined in the call for papers for this Special Issue) makes key assumptions about what it is to be an artist. It assumes, for instance, that the experience of living as an artist, which includes the socialisation, hard work, single-mindedness, and focused energy of creative activity, is incidental rather than essential since these aspects are not comfortably applicable to machines. Instead, it supposes that what is essential is the artistic product, and it is the similarity of human and machine products that makes it possible to speak of machine artists. This definition of art in terms of products is supported by modern psychological theories of creativity, defined as the generation of novel ideas which give rise to valuable products. These ideas take place in the mind or brain, regarded as a closed system within whose workings the secret of creativity will eventually be revealed. This is the framework of what is widely referred to as “cognitivism”. This definition in terms of novel ideas and valuable products has been widely assumed by artificial intelligence (AI) and computational creativity (CC), and this has been backed up through a particular version of the Turing Test. In this, a machine can be said to be a creative artist if its products cannot be distinguished from human art. However, there is another psychological view of creativity, that of John Dewey, in which a lived experience of inquiry and focus is essential to being creative. In this theory, creativity is a function of the whole person interacting with the world, rather than originating in the brain. This makes creativity a Process rather than a Cognitivist framework. Of course, the brain is crucial in a Process theory, but as part of an open system which includes both body and environment. Developments in “machine art” have been seen as spectacular and are widely publicised. But there may be a danger that these will distract from what we take to be the most exciting prospect of all. This is the contribution of computer technology to stimulate, challenge, and provoke artistic practice of all forms.

Survival Research Laboratories: A Dystopian Industrial Performance Art

This paper examines the leading role played by the American mechanical performance group Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) within the field of machine art during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and as organized under the headings of (a) destruction/survival; (b) the cyborg as a symbol of human/machine interpenetration; and (c) biomechanical sexuality. As a manifestation of the era’s “industrial” culture, moreover, the work of SRL artists Mark Pauline and Eric Werner was often conceived in collaboration with industrial musicians like Monte Cazazza and Graeme Revell, and all of whom shared a common interest in the same influences. One such influence was the novel Crash! by English author J. G. Ballard, and which in turn revealed the ultimate direction in which all of these artists sensed society to be heading: towards a world in which sex itself has fallen under the mechanical demiurge.

La pintura como huella: fotografía y pintura en la obra de Gerhard Richter.

El presente texto aborda la cuestión del concepto de índex en la obra pictórica de Gerhard Richter. Esta cualidad de lo fotográfico revierte en la pintura abstracta de los años ochenta en tanto que huella. Para ello, primero se analiza el índex desde la mecanicidad, la tecnicidad y el antiestilo, con el que Richter trabaja sus obras. Para después, analizar cómo el índex, desde su categoría de huella, muestra el rastro de los aparatos por los que fue creado el cuadro. Richter traslada al mundo de la pintura la técnica fotográfica, entrando en un debate de lo fotográfico por la vía de la suplantación de lo pictórico. Un análisis que justifica sus modos de hacer y explica la naturaleza mecánica de sus pinturas. Palabras clave Índex, fotografía, pintura, Gerhard Richter, anti estilo Abstract The present text approaches the work of Gerhard Richter in terms of footprint or index, concept by which better understand the ways of painting of the German artist from 1962. For do this, we analyze how the concept of index works both in the photo-paintings of the 1960s and in the abstract work of the eighties and nineties. It is studied how their ways of doing have to do with a machine art and not with the traditional procedure of painters to create paintings. Afterwards, the debate focuses on the technicality, the mechanicity and the anti-style characteristic of the photo-paintings and the abstract paintings understood as a footprint, far from conventional painting and without any type of artifice. A current reading on the iconic that explores the new languages of the artistic from the mechanicity of the technique in the slide that arises from the photographic to the pictorial. Keywords Índex, photografy, painting, Gerhard Richter, anti-style

Machine-Age Exposition (New York, 1927)

The Machine-AgeExposition took place from 16–28 May 1927 at 119 West 57th Street in Steinway Hall, a commercial space in Manhattan, New York. It exposed the American public to the machine-age aesthetic: a modernist style based upon a belief in technological progress. The style emphasized the qualities of mass production, streamlined design, functionality, dynamism, and force. Jane Heap (1883–1964) of the Little Review Gallery was the main organizer, bringing together engineers and artists to rally momentum for this strain of modernist art. The installation juxtaposed works of architecture, engineering, industrial arts, high-modernist painting, and sculpture in order to emphasize their "inter-relation and inter-influence," as advertised on the exposition flyer. The Machine-Age Exposition highlighted a commonality among these disciplines in their exaltation of the beauty of machinery and celebration of innovation and progress. The exposition celebrated the machine-age aesthetic, as did other exhibitions, most notably Machine Art (1929) at the Museum of Modern Art.