Sunday, March 17, 2013

More melancholic musings over the obsolescence of the artist

The computer drew this the other day

I drew this long ago, age 18.  

I’ve recently seen a video of a robot that draws the customer’s portrait on the foam of their latte.  The video is described as a machine that can “print art on top of a cup of coffee” with no scare quotes around ‘art’.   Does the public not make any distinction between this and a painting? Anyway, the computer looks at you, decides what’s important to draw to make your face, and “expresses” this onto the foam with food coloring.  I can at least appreciate the punning.

Another video demonstrates 3D printers that can print out a guitar.  Bye-bye, luthiers?  It also prints records.  When recorded music became an easily obtained commodity the playing of musical instruments became much less common.  Can we imagine a time when music is something you listen to but no one makes music anymore?  When it is composed and created by machines with programs to produce whatever style and set of sounds you wish. Photography had once seemed to pose such a threat to art, but there was a difference.  Behind the camera was an eye selecting and then hands developing, manipulating, and printing the image.  It was as we say just another tool with which to create.  But computer-made computer generated images remove the need for the human eye and hand. I am not talking here about digital imaging, with the computer as a tool.  I am referring to computer programs that generate the image entirely without human instruction or intervention.  You might think that the writing of the program was the creative part.  But that would be akin to saying the designer of the urinal, not Duchamp, was the creator of Fountain (1917), another once-seeming threat to the nature of art.  But Duchamp’s ready-mades merely altered the material act and left the artist’s invention/intervention intact.  Yes, the viewer completes ‘the creative act’, as Duchamp’s essay by that name contends, but the artist remained as the ‘medium’ or mediator between the physical object and the viewer’s experience.  In the case of the computer generated image or object, there is no actual artist, or perhaps there once was (the designer of the program) and now there is no need of another for further ‘art’ to be made.  The computer robot can just keep making variations.  In a world already saturated with images and objects, will there no longer be a need for human activity to create more? 

It would be interesting to find out if the widespread use of creative media that do much of the designing, thinking, and facture for you has led to a decrease in interest in art as we have known it.  That is, will playing with programs on your computer lead to fewer visits to museums, reduced interest in musical performances (not just production of music at home but attendance at concerts).  Most concerts and performances I attend have many empty seats now, and the audiences are mostly grey-haired.  Will fewer people feel a need to attend art school?  Or will some 20th century ideas of life becoming art, removing the need for something set aside as special called Art, become reality? 

Since I wrote the above, the CAA newsletter linked me to an article in the Guardian that laments the demise of white-collar work and that of the creative classes.  It seems there are also computer programs that can analyze legal contracts and others that read medical data and diagnose better than human doctors.  It looks like humans may become obsolete.  Here is a quote that shows I am not the only one sensing a problem here:

“It may still be some time before robots are writing novels or painting pictures, but it is striking how many of the UK's most high-profile creative industries have already been automated. In music, for instance, it is disquieting how easy it now is to produce a record of commercial quality. To learn to play, let alone compose, a piece on the guitar or piano would take most people years of dedicated effort. But with readily available software on a standard laptop, and a few days of instruction, it is possible for bedroom record producers to generate and aggregate all the components of a perfectly reasonable pop song.”    (“The End of the Creative Classes is in Sight” by Tom Campbell)

There still are people who can, for example, hand-craft the equivalent of a Stradivarius violin, but what will become of such trades when there is no one who bothers to learn to play because a machine can synthesize the sound and even vary the interpretation so you can listen to an infinite number of ‘performances’ without anyone having to spend tens of thousands of hours practicing with care and dedication?  Apply this to everything we do and we are not really talking about ceasing to make buggy whips and building auto ignitions instead. Even decision-making has been automated, e.g. financial advice.  What will there be left for people to do? 

I do realize that the computer programs for creative design, or performance, or writing, or the grading of writing in lieu of teachers, do not yet imitate the quality of human work.  And this is not about using design programs with the computer as a tool for the designer.  This is about the computer doing the design without a human.  The threat is still in the future, but some effects are growing now. 

Am I foolish for worrying about this?   

Now I just found out that an MIT prof has done a TED talk on the same worries.


Sunday, March 3, 2013

Are Artists Obsolete?



Several years ago a couple artist friends and I were at the mall.  There was a photo booth that did your portrait in the style of (select one: Rembrandt, Renoir, Ingres, ...).  "We might as well just quit now," one of them moaned as a digital hand moved a digital pencil and drew examples.  Walter Benjamin could not have foreseen this when he penned his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  That was worry over reproduction, after all, and this was . . .  creation?  Why not; computers now write poems and novels, play chess, suggest restaurants you might like, and even can draw pictures of your thoughts or identify words you are thinking.  So why don't we just quit now?  What is there for a person to do that isn't automat-able?

The memory of that moment came to me when my old computer started to fall apart, requiring a replacement.  The new one came with new toys preloaded, including one called "Photo Booth."  It works a bit like the one in the mall except the only specific artist in the selections is this one illustrated above, called 'Pop Art', but obviously it is like a Warhol.  May I have my 15 minutes of fame now?

There were other ways to shoot oneself with this app, or whatever you might manage to get in front of the computer.  At first I thought this was some scheme to appeal to narcissists (maybe I can get the cat to pose) because it seemed the only thing this was good for was self-portraits.  So I tried the drawing version:


This caught me in profile and set me to remembering a page in my earliest hardbound sketchbook from the early 70's (my teen years).  So I hunted it down and photo'd it (above).  It is from near the end of the book and so I am around 19 or 20.  I did not own a camera at the time, and xerox machines did not yet exist.  So to get this profile, two mirrors had to be set just right so that looking into one I could see my profile.  It appears that the claim that one's nose continues to grow must be true.  The mechanical drawing is decades later.  The old sketch was done very quickly and is marred by transfer from the opposing page and stuff bleeding up through like a palimpsest. But clearly the nose is shorter but much lumpier in the old sketch.  Was I imagining that or exaggerating what I saw as a fault?  The human-made sketch records perceptions that the photo can't, even given that there are decades between the renditions. The computer -made drawing has the illusion of being more accurate, but don't believe it.  Every attempt at a photo looks different, sometimes like a completely different person.  The insistently slanted lines get boring after a while. Humans when they draw well vary their line direction and quality, and can thereby get a more interesting and expressive result.  So far.  

This notebook page set me to thinking about other occasional self-portraits I've done over the years.  Nostalgia set in and I flipped through some old boxes of drawings.  I will post some and continue thinking in my next post about the question of whether artists can be replaced by automation the way many other occupations have been.