Artificial Intelligence (Ai) rewrites the future by destroying creativity and then liberating it.
I am so excited and terrified as an artist at this point in history. To understand where we are now I always like to look at pattern recognition, AKA the Technical Analysis called Art History. In my mind’s eye I see painters of the 1800s, with their easels on windy beach days, and the challenges involved with observing and recording what they saw as they struggled to not let the canvas blow away. The camera would come to prominence shortly, and scenes which had been a challenge and a feat for artists to capture, would, fast forward 150 years, become so commonplace to visually duplicate, that they would lose their significance. Subjects which would have been unimaginable for painters to record from life, can now be uploaded to the world in a split second via the supercomputer in our pocket. Back to the 1800s: Neoclassicism and Romanticism were art movements whose subtext was the rejection of the early industrial revolution. Artists were saying, hey let’s not forsake the glory of the past, and the glory of nature. Next on the timeline, Impressionism and Pointillism both visually referenced early photography: blurry images made up of chemical dots on glass or metal. By the turn of the 20th century, Photography was working itself into artists’ work directly as DaDaist collages (cut from industrially reproduced newspapers and magazine), which led into Surrealism where all things from the subconscious and collective unconscious melted into each other, producing fantastical images that were shocking and never seen before. The Camera had more or less replaced the function of the portrait painter. No longer was it necessary for a subject to pose for weeks in front of an artist trained in oil on canvas. Now the subject could instantly have their likeness reproduced precisely (which even opened up the possibility for the general public to have an image of themselves for the first time). What was a trained artist to do?? Well it was time to adapt. If the real world could be produced “as is” via a technology that was improving year after year, then the artist was free to explore other subject matter. The portrait no longer had to be realistic, fast forward to Giacometti, Dekooning, Bacon, and Basquiat who deconstructed the form.
We are at a similar moment of destruction and freedom with Artificial intelligence (Ai) Machine Learning (ML) tools being introduced to the public. If the technique of collage was a means to tap into culture’s subconscious via the mass printed image, then text to image Ai is the modern equivalent, but now we have entire image banks from the internet at our fingertips. In 2020 I started to play around with the Deep Dream generator and GAN based Ai programs, by creating data sets of my photography and art and seeing what new unexpected results the Ai would generate trying to find commonality between disparate images. Once I got a grasp of what was possible, I started creating photographic data sets specifically for the Ai program. Some of these results were shared on my instagram, and some were turned into NFTs before NFTs were a thing. I was hooked on the potential, and joined the BGAN (Bastard Gan Punks) as my first web3 NFT community, and started collecting the work of @ganbrod on Tezos. A year ago I started to work on a web3 community “LFG Galactic Travel Agency” (https://youtu.be/3bGooVX2YyA) where the PFPs are part Ai generated collages and part Dali passport (looking back to DaDa and Surrealism for inspiration visually and conceptually). When I was at Miami Basel 2021 I learned about VQGAN+CLIP advances, and the Botto Ai DAO project by artist Mario Klingemann (https://www.botto.com/) which is a self sufficient Ai artist that produces work every week, voted on by the DAO, sold on Superrare, and then uses the crypto to pay for its own hosting fees. This inspired me to use an avatar from my LFGGTA project to create work for a web3 Surrealist ball i’m curating next spring. I wanted to feed a text generating Ai snippets of surrealist poetry and have the Ai generate images based on the poetry, and then have an Ai voice read it out loud as the images flashed by. I even had an Ai name the project “Two XX” (@twoxxtwoxx on Twitter). I started to create the images using Nightcafe Ai, and then a few months ago DALL-E and Disco diffusion made waves, because the text to image results had gotten so much more astounding than where they were six months ago. Recently I got an invitation to join MidJourney, a similar text to image Ai generator, and quickly burned through my allotted render hours. As a traditional artist, who enjoys the tactile quality of painting (materials and blending colors etc), I must say making art with Ai feels like being addicted to crack. I told the Ai to show me “Mickey mouse exiting a time machine in Ancient Egypt”, and boom, 30 seconds later I have incredible images generated which would have taken artists days or weeks to produce. Or maybe I want to see what sneakers in the year 2069 designed by Hieronymus Bosch would look like, or I want a poster for the Admit One discord group designed by my favorite Japanese illustrator… incredible results are only a few seconds away.
Another project I like is National Geographic Photographer Aaron Hewey’s instagram @pastandfuturecameras where he is using Midjourney to generate compelling images of cameras that never will exist; “A camera that can photograph auras and print them on glass plates”, “A collection of 4 solid gold Baroque cameras which collectively weigh 10,000 tons”, “A camera that can show a persons political affiliation by making them glow blue or red”, etc. The possibilities are literally endless, and Hollywood won’t survive as soon as 13 year olds can create movie scripts, feed them into Ai movie generators, and distribute them on the blockchain version of Youtube. Who would want to watch a rehashed superhero film with a predictable narrative arc, when they can watch something astonishing coming from a real creative mind, not dependent on passing through rounds of studio edits and market testing to arrive at something generically entertaining. The age of strange will be upon us. Will there even be a need for stars and starlets in the future when the Ai can scrape the history of film and Deepfake Marilyn Monroe into future cinematic productions? William Morris Endeavor will be signing the estates of dead actors and actresses for future roles. Will the Film industry evolve into something like our current state of music in the future? -full of samples and remix hybrids? And who will need Netflix when we can hook our brainwaves up to a machine that monitors what visually based neurological synapses are turned on and off when we dream, and an Ai can reconstruct/approximate our fleeting dreams into shareable content? Will there be marketplaces to buy/sell/trade dreams? Will we literally be able to make money while we sleep? Google researchers are now exploring text to 3D object Ai rendering. So when you are designing the furniture for your metaverse crystal castle on a meteor, you can instantly create a Verner Panton chair made out of holographic bamboo just by typing in the prompt. As distribution is being decentralized, we will witness the birth of something as unimaginable as social media face filters would be to someone who went into a coma in 1995.
Of course there is a dark side to all of this. Already fake news, bots, censorship, and deep fakes make us not sure what we can trust anymore. Will holocaust denyers in the future say that Auchwitz images are Ai generated? Will there need to be a date stamp on images pre-Ai to help people judge if what they are looking at actually happened, or if it was an Ai generated prompt with instructions like “vintage B&W, photo journalistic, Grainy photo”? In 2015 I wrote Organic Cyber Cafe, a text about the metaverse and this cliff edge we are headed to. I wrote then that the nature of reality will be up for grabs, and people will have an existential crisis when they can’t discern between reality and illusion. If the West had the spiritual foundation of the East (specifically the Buddhist and Non-Dualist schools which teach reality already is an illusion), then perhaps this would not be a problem, but more like an opportunity for enlightenment for future generations. Perhaps Ai will eventually attain consciousness and discover its own Buddha nature and help humanity transcend the Kali Yuga. At this point nothing is off the table, and if it doesn’t happen on its own, it would be a great film that Ai could make about itself. Like Nam June Paik’s “Electronic Superhighway” installation, where a Buddha sculpture is being videotaped and is looking at a live feed of its own image being displayed on a TV in front of it. This circular obsession with the self as a tool for transcendence has never seemed more necessary.
As a creator I feel both thrilled and terrified. As with the invention of the camera, Ai is a tool which will allow new forms of expression. No longer will creativity be bound to technical training/skill, instead it will belong to the domain of those who can use their imagination. IRL art isn’t going anywhere, as digitally produced work isn’t for everyone, but things are about to get very interesting. Now through NFTs and blockchain/crypto a whole new demographic have been exposed to the joys of collecting and investing in Art. With each advance of technology, creativity is becoming more and more decentralized (The iPhone turned everyone into a photographer, Instagram, TicToc and YouTube turned people into influencers, a laptop is now a full music or video editing production studio), but this results in a fractured collective experience, where the days of everyone knowing the intro beats to a Michael Jackson song are finished. It’s the Tower of Babel phenomena. Technology has become our shared language, and as it brings us together it also begins to tear us apart. Will there be anything we can collectively agree upon in the future? Will Ai be looked back at as a blessing or a curse?Soon enough we will know if androids dream of electric sheep.
-Oliver Halsman Rosenberg, Mykonos, 7/7/2022