Abstract
In recent years there has been growing interest in artificial neural networks (ANNs) which are quickly becoming the primary device for machine learning. Used for finding patterns in large data sets, ANNs were also recently employed in many artistic contexts: as tools for artists, semi-independent creators of content, and even as invisible “critics” which / who predict our aesthetic preferences. The aim of this paper is to speculate about the disruptive effect of these ‘alien agencies’ on the (modernist) aesthetic regime of art centred around the notion of autonomy. The author examines how neural networks and connectionist epistemologies may potentially affect the most common ways of producing, circulating, and valorising art. He claims that the possibility of automatizing creativity and art criticism may lead to the emergence of a new aesthetic regime based on forms of dynamic, distributed and probabilistic governance.
Highlights
The rumour goes that Rembrandt’s ‘A Cat Sitting on MacBook Air’ and Van Gogh’s ‘Petunias’ were recently discovered and soon will be on display in Louvre in Paris
This event is planned as a follow-up to the recent presentation of ‘The Rembrandt’ which was unveiled in Amsterdam at Rembrandt House in 2016
The project attracted a lot of interest and – naturally – incited controversies concerning its rightful allocation: does it belong to the museum or gallery? And if so, to what kind of museum? Of contemporary or classical art? Or maybe it ‘deserves’ a new kind of institution altogether which could serve as a ghetto for masterpieces made by non-human agents? But would it not be Entartete Kunst all over again? District 9 for inhuman art?. Such considerations may sound as untimely and ridiculous science fiction, but art made by artificial neural networks (ANNs) and deep learning algorithms has already been shown in galleries and sold on auctions
Summary
The rumour goes that Rembrandt’s ‘A Cat Sitting on MacBook Air’ and Van Gogh’s ‘Petunias (by Kac)’ were recently discovered and soon will be on display in Louvre in Paris (in collaboration with Google and MIT). In many ways contemporary art market and critical discourse has been long ready to welcome Rembrasso and his undead friends It suffices to mention in this context that once popular prefixes like ‘neo-‘ or ‘post-‘ were recently supplemented by a new term eagerly added by critics to the old labels of art movements: the ‘zombie’. I want to argue and speculate that the introduction of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) technologies into the art field can, disrupt the axiological and institutional foundations of modern Western aesthetics and of our ‘regime of art’. To reflect on such possibility I will try to examine the technological specificity of neural networks in the context of Jacques Rancière’s philosophy. A theoretical investigation of ANNs in the context of art can shed some light both on the present state of our aesthetic regime and on their possible futures
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