DEMAND FULL AUTOMATION OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Only very recently even the most optimistic forecasts concerning the prospects of automation spoke of the impossibility of imagining, for instance, a self-driving automobile. For a long time, navigation in the conditions of real traffic seemed too complicated to be formalized as a computer program. Even the possibility of the visual identification of moving automobiles, with their geometry constantly shifting according to the viewer’s location, was seen as an insoluble problem for machines, although for the human brain it is one of the fully automated functions of perception, requiring no additional effort. But today debates on the consequences of the transition to automated transportation for the economics of roadside cafés and the families of long-distance lorry drivers are already taken completely for granted. And the epoch-making defeat of Gary Kasparov by the supercomputer Deep Blue in 2006 already seems like distant history, seen from the viewpoint of the development of computing technology. Ten years later, even a common gaming app for a mobile phone can provide serious competition for flesh-and-blood grandmasters.
For a long time the final bastion of resistance to artificial intelligence in the field of board games was the Japanese game Go, owing to the wide range of various possible moves and the substantial dimensions of the playing board. But even in this area, in the mid 2010s the computer program AlphaGo, constructed using neural networks, proved too good for the finest representatives of the human race. The automated processing of requests for financial loans, writing of texts such as press releases (or even imitative poetry), and development of new collections of mass-market clothing have already become reality. Next in line is medical diagnosis, and after that comes the development of robots capable of duplicating the fine motor skills of human beings, such as moving up and down a ladder or cooking food, which, according to Moravec’s paradox (“contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources”) remain a more difficult problem than intellectual activity.
However, there is one form of human activity that is regarded by definition as immune to automation. This is creative activity in general and, in particular, contemporary art, which, as distinct from various kinds of art that emphasize craftsmanship and technical skills, long ago formulated its fundamental rule as the absence of all rules and its fundamental skill as the ability to develop new skills. Beginning from the twentieth century it became the norm to consider that as soon as the pattern according to which any given work by an artist is produced has been identified, any further use of that pattern becomes pointless. At least, that is the way that things happen for the history of art, which plays the role of an authority qualified to identify and preserve cultural messages, correlating them with the inventory of what is already known, with what has become the rule and demands specific skills. The artist’s gamble is to produce a work of art that is as difficult as possible to identify, by playing on the boundary between what is already known and what is not yet known, with the constant risk of being left unidentified, outside the inventory of art. But one way or another, the factor that determines the value of a work is precisely the intensity of its novelty. Consequently, in the case of art we are dealing with an activity undertaken to create patterns that are ever more difficult to identify and to develop an ever more complicated system for identifying them.
One can imagine how difficult it is to create a self-driving car for moving along a road on which there is no visual and, at times, no conceptual correspondence between the moving objects, and the traffic regulations are determined by a consistent rejection of everything that has ever been identified as a rule. It should be noted that, compared with other types of activity involving pattern recognition, contemporary art is significantly less homogenous. It incorporates a high level of elements that are extraneous, even though they are drawn from the funds of a classical set – painting, sculpture and performative practices. Beginning from the 1970s and the advent of what Rosalind Krauss called the ‘post-medium’ condition of art, the only thing that holds works together is precisely the methodology of their creation and the identification of the previously unidentified. The limit in this game of ever-higher stakes is the transcendence of art as a distinct form of activity, whether through its annihilation, as the Dadaists demanded, or through the rethinking of life as a whole in accordance with the rational laws of artistic production, as demanded by the Soviet constructivists. At this point the history of art, with its inventory of items that defy indexing, must coincide with human history, and thereafter with history understood as activity undertaken for the development of the universe as a whole.
The role of the artist in this model of art is the role of a generator of patterns that resist instant identification, which cannot be identified as art on the basis of what is already known about art. In and of itself, this conception of artistic activity bears the imprint of Romanticism, with its faith in the ultimate freedom of the creative genius, and it has its own precise historical boundaries and sociopolitical determinacy. In contemporary interpretations the human being already proves inadequate to the role of a generator of the unidentifiable. He/she is too determined by his own history and physiology, too constrained by the specifics of a system of economic production that require him to search for ways and means to survive and, to top things off, he is corrupted by his connection with a history of art that holds out a promise of immortality, even if it is only virtual. But one way or another, to this day precisely the ability to produce nonautomated solutions, which result in the production of art with new patterns, previously unidentified by the history of art, is still recognized as one of the determining and distinctive features of the human being. And if the moment comes when the human being proves incapable of demonstrating the required level of creative freedom, but a machine is capable of doing it, then the machine will become more human than a human being, who will, in turn, begin to be perceived as more machinelike than a machine. Analogous examples of machines that are too human and human beings who are too mechanical and automated abound in contemporary science fiction literature and cinema.
But is contemporary art genuinely unexplored territory, where the ultimate human qualities of creative freedom are realized, as is generally believed? Even from what has been said above, it is possible to draw the conclusion that this is not entirely the case. Market relations and capitalism in general have produced exactly the same changes with regard to art that they have produced with regard to other particular aspects of production in the feudal system. That is, they have revolutionized relations of production by formalizing and desacralizing them. It has to be acknowledged, however, that art, as distinct from other forms of the production of added value, still retains the archaic features of artisanal activity. Even now it remains difficult for us to imagine the assembly-line production of art, and, with a certain degree of license, the relations between collector and institutional patron can be likened to the relations between a feudal lord and his dependent vassals.
The actual consequences of the capitalist transformation of art are negatively marked, not because they are connected with a vicious system of exploitation – the illegitimate appropriation of added value also occurs in artistic production – but because of their destructive influence on the fetishized, pre-capitalist aspects of the organization of artistic labor. The belief exists that artisanal production and craft-based self-organization are invariably positively marked, and they are defended, together with more humanitarian labor conditions and more archaic forms of exploitation.
The basic reproach that one often hears with regard to the consequences of capitalist organization for contemporary art concerns art’s bureaucratization. The number of artists in the world whose recipes for the creation of contemporary art are becoming accessible on a mass scale is increasing, and the difference between a capitalized education system and cost-free interaction on the internet is gradually disappearing. Instead of receiving unique works by individual geniuses, more and more often we find ourselves dealing with the mass production of an artistic product, possessing a value that equals the institutionally protected history of art. As a potential response to the situation that has come about, one hears appeals for the creation of artisanal, self-organized educational institutions or even unique local dialects of art that have not yet been appropriated or automated by the industry that produces contemporary art. But is not this argument similar to the conservative position of the Luddites, who smashed machines because they were forcing flesh-and-blood human beings out of their jobs? The response from the left to this kind of criticism could be to support the capitalist industrialization of artistic production, which, despite all its negative aspects, is better than feudal vassalage and will, sooner or later, offer the chance of a revolutionary transformation of the situation. Yes, we have fewer unique patterns of contemporary art, but it becomes available for mass production. Yes, we no longer have the comfort of human interaction with the collector or the individual who commissions art works, but we are not dependent on them to such a great extent, etc.
Whether we like it or not, today contemporary art is a social institution with its own economy and machinery of production. As compared with a work’s relations with the history of art, the relations of purchase and sale are subject to a significantly greater degree of inertia, which implies a demonstrably lesser amount of the unknown. As a rule, in order to be bought a work must correspond to a precise set of criteria, from the state of the market to the banal ability to be displayed on a collector’s wall. The actual process of an artist’s own formation is linked to a set of procedures that presuppose capitalist formalization. Education in the sphere of contemporary art is linked, to an even greater degree than the once simple relations between master and apprentice, to a specific set of expectations and aesthetic, economic, and social obligations. And although in a certain sense training in contemporary art as the development of skill in creating what cannot be reduced to skill is contradictory in and of itself, a total repudiation of training leads to the endless replication of a set of personal traumas and the most common clichés of artistic self-expression, which are merely the socially accepted tokens of creative freedom.
But the history of contemporary art itself fails the test for containing unformalized, absolutely innovative works. In the last 100 to 150 years the world has seen only a small number of substantial transformations, which, at best, have developed through the creative rejigging of well-known discoveries of the past. It would be no great exaggeration to assert that to this day contemporary art is still nourished by the heritage of modernism and, in exceptional cases, of the avant-garde, which have defined the overall scope for the perception of artistic activity in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And if that is so, then, despite a high level of ‘internal’ mutations, the scope of its potential manifestations may actually be susceptible to formalization and computation, although it would require the indexing of a gigantic number of possible variations. Yes of course, this is a goal that has never been set. On the contrary, as stated above, the very fact of this possibility’s existence is regarded as contradicting the logic of contemporary art. But it is obvious that a certain level of automation is, in itself, an excluded compromise that guarantees art’s existence and its very recognition as a human activity that cannot be automated in principle.
For the human being, the fact that concessions are made concerning the absolute newness of what is produced allows wide scope for speculating and recombining in various ways what is already known, which, depending on the specifics of any particular moment, may possess a rather high level of legitimation on the territory of the history of art. Thus, the twentieth century has already seen the Russian avant-garde, the American avant-garde, the second avant-garde, the postwar avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde, the trans-avant-garde and so forth. For a computer – let us call it a robot artist – this signifies the possibility of creating, by means of formalization, a gigantic number of series of works that remain as yet unrealized, but are permissible from the viewpoint of the history of art.
In the case of the human being, the open use of already known patterns for the creation of works of art is perceived as kitsch or an expression of the corrupt nature of the market, which is described as the main obstacle in the path of the imagination. “Zombie formalism” is a pejorative label, not only for the variations on abstract painting that constantly come back round again, thanks to commodity fetishism, but overall for an art that is accused of bureaucratizing its own production, denigrating the Romantic, accenting the mechanical and automating the basic principle of the way art works (after all, the artist’s labor really does retain within itself dead capital – education, the capitalization of the name and so forth). However, for a robot artist even this level of creative activity could be a giant step forward and the beginning of a great journey. Roboformalism could exploit this dead capital that is contained in a work of art, not exclusively for earning money or winning recognition by the history of art, which is characteristic of our species, but in order to go beyond the human being and the specific features of his artistic activity.
The automation and formalization of contemporary art allow us to speak of the creation of a complete archive of the history of art (future and past), that is, a list not only of actual, but also of potential works of art, created on the basis of the already known (a computer learns in a similar fashion to play the classic table games, in particular Go). These works could be actualized through individual ‘robographies’, the histories of specific machines in specific social contexts – an anthropomorphic kind of solution. But they could also be revealed via more industrialized forms, such as the brands of the machines, with a corresponding set of features, etc. Or they could assume the form of a unified complex standing behind the authorship of artificial intelligence at a greater or lesser degree of development. And the history of art could also be transformed by using technologies similar to the mechanisms with which cryptocurrencies work, i.e. the block chain. This would make it possible to free this history of the negative consequences of human-specific features, which corrupt the recording of patterns of the as-yet-unidentified as a result of the specific traits of capitalist production. Access to the history of art opens up the possibility of the accelerated capitalization of any given work, any given artist, etc. Furthermore, we can imagine the existence of different versions of the history of art, in each of which different combinations of works are realized and their sequence varies accordingly.
At first glance such a turn of events appears rather pointless for the human being and therefore improbable. Who will want to buy and hang on his wall a monochrome work painted by a robot or admire such a work in a museum? However, concealed within this very pointlessness there may lie even more unexpected and unpleasant consequences for the human being as artist. The possibility of creating an archive of this kind and of robot artists raises a serious question about the value of human creative activity as such, at least in the form in which it manifests itself in contemporary art today. The transformation that we are interested in can be compared with the invention of photography, initially perceived as a medium capable of supplanting ‘nonmechanical’ human art, which at that time was based on the mimetic copying of reality. In the case of roboformalism, the most pessimistic scenario for art produced by human beings could amount to its transformation into craftwork and exclusion from the zone of artistic production as such. This could be facilitated to a considerable extent by justified criticism of human limitations in production and pattern recognition, resulting from the way in which a human being is conditioned by his specific cultural and physiological characteristics. Just as animals were once dislodged from their position as an important force of production, becoming transformed over time into a mere resource, so will human participation in the process of creating and identifying new patterns be reduced to a stylistic set of solutions, which can be used to produce the specific effect of the ‘human.’ However, as in the case of the automation of other spheres of capitalist production, at the initial stage automation of this kind could raise the question of a basic income and essential compensation. Thus, in a similar fashion to the way in which we now have specific food products labeled as “non-GMO” or “BIO,” i.e. produced in conditions approximating those that were natural to previous centuries, it is possible to anticipate the appearance of separate sectors of art labeled as ‘human-made’. This support could also, in addition, be expressed in a guaranteed dose of recognition by the machines or attention from viewers of the same sort, or financing with the purpose of preserving the specific features of human self-expression. But, most importantly, in the possibility of being freed from the requirement to produce exclusively what is new and nondetermined, which in the conditions of late capitalism will become almost obligatory. In a world that has adopted the slogan “Everyone is an artist,” in which everyone is obliged to be creative, the possibility of a creative repudiation of participation in the artistic production of life is a privilege in itself. As Marx once dreamed, sooner or later, the harsh specialization typical of the early stages of capitalist production will disappear and the human being will be a production-line worker in the morning, an artist in the afternoon, and a sportsman in the evening.
However, if the current trend towards the automation of creative activity continues, it is probable that the human being will disappear, at least in the form in which we know him/her. Then, on condition that artificial intelligence is friendly to humans, we can predict the actualization of the scenario outlined in Russian cosmism and by Nikolay Fedorov. As we know, according to this philosophical doctrine, the quintessence of human creative activity is the resurrection of the dead in their complete physical form, and their subsequent settlement throughout the universe. At the same time Fedorov and a number of his followers, for instance Tsiolkovsky, pointed out that the continuation of evolution is inevitable, with the consequent transformation of the human species, in particular of its corporeal embodiment. After all, having been created as a result of specific conditions in the past, this embodiment is not necessarily adequate to the present moment. In the cosmists’ opinion, first and foremost the mechanism of generations succeeding each as a result of death has ceased to fulfill its function. But that is not all. Many organs of the human body could be improved. And in this respect Russian cosmists are without question the forerunners of the modern transhumanism movement, which also notes that in the immediate future, perhaps even starting now, specific features of our body that were created at one time by nature will be replaced by new, artificially produced, more perfect forms. Not only artificial hearts and artificial limbs, but also the lungs and the digestive system, and, in the near future, intelligent colonies of nanorobots, which will provide real-time control and optimization of human existence in its organic form. The logic of this development can easily be taken to the limit by imagining the human being as a super-complex formation that has become commensurate, in and of itself, with the nonmaterial processes in the universe.
But the development of events in this vein calls into question the possibility of resurrecting the generations that have previously lived in their physical bodies and in their psychological totality. Even if a highly developed human race or its heirs, in the form of the robotized population of the planet or artificial intelligence, should wish to do this out of gratitude for the contribution that human beings have made to progress and the victory over death, the problem is that bringing back people of the past into a future in which the characteristics of the human species have practically disappeared would traumatize them irrecoverably. Eternal human life in all its imperfection – both physical and psychological – alongside their highly developed successors would mean the unbearable torment of awareness of one’s own weakness. And if that is so, then a return to the past, to a form of life on earth that may be underdeveloped, but is characteristic of the species in question, would be a great reward. The result might turn out to be the reconstruction of life on earth from its inception to the advent of a machine capable of creative activity and the subsequent gradual transformation of the human being.
But another scenario is also possible. As we know, photography, as automated visual art, only indicated the need to rethink human artistic activity, it did not completely destroy it. On the contrary, it was the catalyst for processes that led to the increased complexity of this activity and the crystallization of a number of its characteristic features in contemporary art, including the reinforcement of innate, specifically human features such as a unique ‘signature’ and distinctive human expression, or even the opposite tendency of the mimicry of machine art or collaborative activity – geometric abstraction, the rationalization of visual forms or even production art. In a certain sense a situation in which the artist is formed together with an archive of future art is like the situation of a chess player who plays with the help of a computer that calculates the consequences of the human being’s strategic decisions, but does not take decisions independently. Rodchenko already dreamed of a time when the development of technology would mean that an artist only had to imagine a specific work of art in his mind, after which it could be realized automatically. Today the mass production of images that is typical of the social networks exploits various kinds of filters as a similar kind of technology (including filters with the distinctive stylistic features of the art of the past): the user makes his/her selection each time, depending on his concept. The existence of an archive of all potential artistic forms carries this tendency to the limit. Co-creation and the coexistence of human being and robot in the field of art represent a scenario for the further development of the tendency towards automation that is optimistic for the human being, although there are no grounds for assuming that it will exist for long without the disappearance of the clear boundary between the ‘natural’ and the artificial.
Another important consequence of the advent of roboformalism and the creation of a complete archive of the art of the future could be the appearance of the possibility of the radicalization of some of the modernist maxims regarding the generation of new artistic forms. As we know, one of the key definitions of the postwar avant-garde, which has remained influential to this day, is its medium-specific nature, which requires that visual art, in its turn, abandon narrative, as being specific to the methodology of another type of art – literature. However, the formal innovations of artists claiming to express this requirement as fully as possible have ended up, irrespective of the artists’ volition, in a position of dependence on the narrative of the history of art. This is a feature characteristic of all forms of life within our universe, because there is a direction to time and, accordingly, inertia in the unfolding of processes. For instance, the transfer of heat from a cold body to a warm one is impossible. At the same time, the human being has a tendency to create new models of relations that deny the directionality of time and historical determination. On the territory of art a model of this kind is the museum. After all, this is an institution capable of accumulating in a single space structures that were formed in different time periods, while ignoring their historical sequence, which means that it banishes the linear nature of the historical narrative, at least within arbitrarily defined limits.
The existence of an archive with a complete list of both past and future formal innovations creates the possibility of liberation from the influence of the narrative of history in the given aspect of artistic production. From being a factor that subordinates every new form, the history of art is inherently transformed into a medium, a matrix, similar to an alphabet, which is capable of creating without any reference to linear development in time (after all, words and sentences do not depend on the sequence of letters in the alphabet). A function similar to the one described has already been performed by history in the time of the historical avant-garde. Posing the question of transcending or annihilating art required the existence of an authority capable of differentiating what it was that needed to be transcended or annihilated. But the possibility of protracted existence in a mode of nonlinear narrative ‘after the death of art’ was not consciously considered, although to this day it remains the basis of the history of modernist and contemporary art. Every new form was declared to be the last in the chain of development and denied the potential existence of a future after itself. The consciously considered dependence of nonnarrative forms of art on the narrative of the history of art, together with the computation of all possible formal innovations, opens up the possibility of creating even more complex, freer patterns of artistic production that are not preset. And simultaneously it actualizes a scenario that is new to western modernism, the scenario of the resurrection and preservation for subsequent life of the transformational hopes expressed through ‘the deaths of art’.
But it is not only the formal component of artistic production that can undergo mutation as a result of the automation of contemporary art. The field relating to content can also be significantly expanded. Thus, in the most ambitious version of modernist art, the boundaries of its content were expressed through the rejection of representation and conditioned by the specific features of the existence of the artwork and the human being as material bodies. This interpretation of art opposed it to religious art and the various forms of mimetic and representational realism. As distinct from modernism, they were declared to be too illusory, since they led away from the physical presence, here and now, of the human being and the work, that is, from the limits of the attainable. At the same time this human limit was declared to be the limit of the world and was constructed on a rather naive faith in a necessary parallelism between the microcosm (the human being and the work) and the macrocosm (the material universe). In other words, it was assumed that readdressing the limitations of the human being is actually equivalent to aspiring to the limits of the universe. Thus, in this aspect modernist art opposed itself to the art of representation, which leads away from the limits of the human being and attempts to indicate the human being’s limited nature and inadequacy in terms of reception of the world, which means that it leads to the illusory and the false.
But today all that we know about the specific material characteristics of our universe is expressed through scientific representations and cannot on any account be limited by the specific nature of human existence on planet Earth without substantial distortions. Representation no longer leads away from material reality; on the contrary, it becomes the only channel of communication with it that is accessible to the human being. And, vice versa, the presumption that the world is totally accessible to the human being, via a parallelism between microcosm and macrocosm is, in and of itself, an illusion that leads away from reality. The textbook example of modernist art claiming to be a radical materialistic expression of the world is Jackson Pollock’s dripping. According to the accepted point of view, in this technique the artist renounces his own specifically human nature to the maximum possible extent, in favor of forms conditioned by the material forces that form our universe. Positioning the canvas on a horizontal surface made it possible to employ the force of gravity and the attraction of the Earth as a factor determining the artistic form. The paint falls onto the canvas and spreads out across it in exactly the same way that apples fall from trees and do not go hurtling out into cosmic space. But are this type of art and this type of physics the only possible ones for attempting a materialistic description of the world? It is obvious that if Pollock had painted his pictures while in orbit round planet Earth inside a space station, the specific features of the development of form within his works would have been fundamentally different. And what once seemed to be a natural and limiting expression of the materialistic nature of artistic practice would have been shown to be merely a particular instance, representative of human nature and of the human being’s natural habitat.
In the light of such a turn of events, representational art becomes an example of a more productive model of the way that art works directly with inaccessible content. Its specific formal aspects are organized on the basis of powerful contrasts that exploit the distinctive features of human perception, for instance, the creation of an effect of the sublime by means of organ music that transcends the customary acoustic range, or the use of stained-glass windows that intensify the saturation of color, thereby pointing out the limited nature of this aspect of our everyday existence, etc. In the case of mimetic realism we are dealing with inaccessibility in the here and now of a definite situation or, on the contrary, with access, by means of representation, to an understanding of one or another process in the reality of human life. The existence of an archive of artistic forms of future innovations can, in its turn, be used to create contemporary representations of the material universe that are not necessarily tied to the specific perceptual features of any species, similarly to the way in which a scientific representation of the universe is not obliged to seek any correspondence to the range of human sensitivity. The combination of an archive of formal innovations that is as complete as possible with an openness to what is not directly accessible substantially defines the horizon for the development of art in both its human and collaborative variants, or even in the creative work of artificially created machines independently of the human being.
In conclusion we can note that the automation of contemporary art does not presuppose any necessary political transformation of the world in which it takes place. Just as the automation of work at the beginning of the twenty-first century does not assume the transition from capitalism to a postcapitalist condition. Rather, we are dealing here with a specific tendency which, depending on the various political contexts, can lead to the actualization of various scenarios. A large part of the above is feasible rumination on the theme of how this tendency could develop in conjunction with the existing state of affairs, i.e. within capitalist relations. Furthermore, it is seen as an inevitable consequence of these relations only insofar as it clarifies the connection between contemporary art, in the form in which it is known to us, and a specific type of political and economic formation. However, in the twentieth century an attempt was made to create an alternative trajectory for the development of transformations of art and the specific features of its production. First and foremost we have in mind the postrevolutionary Soviet museums of the 1920s and 1930s, and also reflections on the subject of the museum that were typical of Russian cosmism. In the case of the museums, we can trace a similar movement from individual creative activity – conditioned by the specific features of the human species, by the relations of production in which it finds itself, and by the development of image-making technologies – to institutional creative activity that is collective and industrial, based on more complex foundations. But the most important distinguishing feature of this line is the absence of capitalist relations. Precisely because of this, progress in the interpretation of Nikolay Fedorov or Walter Benjamin has been marked by an important but primarily negative consequence of the existing state of affairs, until such time as the human race realizes its danger and its potential possibilities. Until such time as a revolution occurs, i.e. – in the case of Benjamin – until someone pulls the emergency brake of the locomotive of history, which is hurtling into the abyss of technological catastrophe; or – in the case of Fedorov – until fraternal equality is achieved between all warring parties, between those who have knowledge and those who don’t, between town and country and, most importantly, between those who were once alive and those who gave their lives for those who are alive today. And the automation of contemporary art will become one more wonderful possibility on the way to boundless creative freedom.