Cinegraphic: Art by Machine

from Cinegraphic.net:

Art by Machine

URL: https://www.cinegraphic.net/article.php?story=20080722093832323

Conceptual art in the 1960s appeared at the same moment when it started to become possible for artists to stop making art and instead simply direct a computer—or other machine—to do it for them.

While this wasn't really a new development, it was the first time it could readily be implemented by a great number of artists: Computer art was born.

Sol LeWitt's "manifesto" of conceptualism, Sentences on Conceptual Art, 1968 foreshadows this transformation of the role for machines. LeWitt states that the constraints used to make art—when drawn from the history of art—form the conventions an artist employs in the process of making art work. It is a simply observation that allows the creation of automated systems using these constraints—a fundamental premise of all computerized approaches to manufacture. The crux of his sentences is the relationship an artist has to the source of those conventions: given the breadth of art history, it is arguable that these conventions could take potentially any form; his comments suggest that creating the boundaries necessary for working becomes part of the artist's work (or is the art itself).

Art objects exist simultaneously as objects for interpretation and as expressions of specific conventions whose relationship may not be self-reflexive: the conventions themselves are separate from any meaning that may result from following those conventions. The concept of "style," as used to describe traditional art, can be understood to perform this role. The creation of a convention set (whether explicitly as "conventions" or implicitly through "style") provides the logic of the sequence. These conventions produce a network of potentials that enables the creation of the individual work. This framework necessarily constrains the physical form of the work and the possibilities for depiction within that form.

Thus, when making art becomes an autonomous process, the aesthetics of the work are literally built into the machine itself. Situating human agency at the decision making stage of the art's production creates two distinct ways to view the function of the framework in producing the art. Emphasis can be placed on either (a) the machine itself, or on (b) what the machine produces. When the artist's programming and design of the machine gains emphasis, it makes the result simply a proof that the machine does what it should. Viewing what the machine makes as a "proof of function" renders those works simply an iteration of following the instructions, specifically displacing the art from the fabricated works to on the machine itself and its processes. The same lingering skepticism that denied photography the status of art for the first century of its existence is evident here in the tendency to deny the art produced by a machine status as an art work, even though that machine follows the artist's specifications precisely.

What is at issue with these works is the question of human agency in the creation of art: what role must the artist have in relation to the creation of the art for it to be immediately acceptable as art? For many artists who work with automated systems, they show both the device and its products together, thus allowing the "proof of function" interpretation, an approach that is less readily available if the machine is not exhibited in conjunction with the work produced.

The ability to break the process of making art into a set of descriptive instructions (the network of potentials that conventions produce) is a prerequisite to being able to produce art-making machines. By focusing on the decision-making aspects of human agency in determining the final art work, rather than the active, physically engaged dimension of art creation, it becomes possible to consider the distinctions between these two activities and the ways they combine to literally inscribe aesthetic concerns and beliefs about the nature of the work in the construction of machineries for making art. This framework recognizes the artist's role as the designer of art, rather than as necessarily the fabricator of those works. Understanding the creation of art in these terms extends the recognition that skilled laborers employed by an artist (in the form or technicians or assistants) in making art can be applied and understood as in the use of automated technology as well.