Mutterings
R.
That was his first name, truly.
Mutt.
His last name gives it away.
He was a urinal.
That's what Marcel Duchamp named it/him when he entered it into an art exhibition held by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. Duchamp called it "Fountain".
Some said it was brilliant. A readymade! A stroke of genius.
Others were not so sanguine. It is said that Alfred Stieglitz considered it trash and threw it away.
The Society rejected it. Duchamp, who was a member of that Board, resigned.
The question nagged at us: What is art?
In an age of AI, we face the same conundrum.
For urinal, substitute words. Anyone, without training, without a gallery, can enter words into a query and get an image, today's version of a fountain. Is it Art?
There are the rose-colored optimists, who believe that AI and its cousin AGI are the early blooms of a vast new undiscovered world, where limitless adventures (and riches) await.
There are others, like Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder at DeepMind, who advocate thinking of AI as "a new kind of species". The looming implications of that concept are huge and hugely ominous. (1) What if that new species asks what humans were good for? What if they conclude, not much?
"The Intercosmic Zoo welcomes 2 new specimens of Homo Sapiens Extinctus".
As a digital artist I create new species continually. I invite viewers to see them as real, in some sort of parallel world.
What if they became really real? What if they walked out of the screen and shook your hand?
Woody Allen raised that challenge in "Purple Rose of Cairo", where characters in the film jumped off the screen and into the audience.
I tried inventing words to see what AI would make of them.
Is the art in the creation of a word? Does a nonsense word become a reality now that we are discussing it?
Does a fountain turn a urinal into beauty by renaming it?
Am I an Artist, or a Krepildockerschpe? (2)
Not incidentally, we are dealing here with boundaries; whether a urinal can be art is merely one, a boundary which Duchamp smashed with apparent glee. In an AI era, another profound boundary emerges between human and nonhuman. We can't seem to agree on what those words mean. In fact, there is little that we agree upon except that war is good for the economy and leaders with insatiable egos love to wage it.
According to a children's rhyme, "sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but...". The but is all-important.
R
These
Mutterings?
c. Corinne Whitaker always...maybe
(1) Axios AI
(2)Corinne Whitaker, Krepildockerschpe, 2019.
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