The Role of the Generative Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
March 29, 2024
Generative art is a new medium in the visual arts. It is performed by a computer running a generative art machine using a set of instructions from user input. Using these instructions, the program generates unique digital images. Though such instructions may include a base image as the main reference for form or a group of key phrases, the look of the final product may not be completely in the user’s control. This mode of creating images is different from traditional art practice in that it takes away the autonomy of the artist in creating the artwork, separating the medium from digital photography, for example.
More than simply replacing the hand of the artist or the human touch, generative art unpredictably complicates the way we interact with art.
Instead of creating the work directly, the user creates a set of tasks for a machine to do. Therefore, the image is mediated differently from previous methods of image-making. The human in this new medium is replaced in her role as the artist or artisan by the computer program. This simplifies, and borderline eliminates the human’s role in creating art and thereby alienates her.
The generative artist is alienated primarily by the removal of the human touch in making art. When his job is mechanized, the artist himself, in part, becomes obsolete. The primary creator of the art is inarguably the computer, as the decision-making is followed through on a set of encoded instructions in binary, rather than human decision. By removing this agency, the artist is not wholly identified within the artwork. His feelings are not represented on the canvas in the spurs of the hand and the dashing motion of the brush. Instead, a variable or a few he introduces to the code might affect the final result to unpredictable effects.
As a seminal generative artist and author of The Pioneer of Generative Art, Frieder Nake discusses another foundational figure in computer art, German academic Georg Nees, who addresses the problem of all machinic art: “No operation can be implemented on a machine unless it has been described explicitly beforehand.” (230). Such an explicit description is not the involvement of the user in data entry to generate art. That instead originates in the programmer. As the programmer-artist describes instructions to the machine, she is creating the framework which the user will later interact with on a more superficial level to make the program run. The programmer is alienated because her function is not making the art directly, but providing the means for the art to be created. Just as the person who makes the paintbrush is alienated in some way from the art that is created with it, generative art as a medium necessitates that alienation from the craftsman.
“The final concern might be related to the black-box approach and possible hyperproduction of art. […] Such a black-box approach should not stop the civilizational urge to unbox the machine, the broaden the boundaries of artistic expressions […] While black-box usage reduces the necessity for fine skills that are traditionally needed to produce art, thereby jeopardizing some traditional artistic values, it leads to immediate results that eventually become expected and common […] it is an approach that simultaneously stands against and with Heidegger’s idea of artists as revealers of truth, able to dispel threats of enframing” (57,58)
People may be worried about how generative art could be wastefully and meaninglessly produced. The simple way to address this is that if generative art is really so shallow then it will simply be cast away as the dreck that it is. Thus, if not cast away, as more than an instrument or a commodity, generative art maintains its artistic character (something which is enframed is presented as mere ‘standing-reserve’, a mere commodity).
The consumer is another party that is alienated by the medium of generative art, alongside the planet, as its natural resources are exploited. As Krell (2022) discusses in his analysis of philosopher Martin Heidegger: “Modern technology, which exploits and exhausts–in Heidegger’s terms, “challenges”–our planet’s resources.” This is today most relevant in the transformation of the natural world into a source of profit in data mining, crypto mining, NFT minting, and other similarly environmentally taxing digital activities (2022). Technology, when viewed as a mere instrumentality, leads us to enframe the natural world, and in enframing the natural world we enframe ourselves, turning humans into human standing reserves, or Human Resources. The alienation from our commonly perceived ontological difference from the rest of the material world equates and integrates humans with the material: “our use of the expression “human resources” aligns human beings with raw materials such as coal or petroleum” (2022). Specifically, the resources which we exploit from the Earth to power our insatiable desire for advancement technologically are those with which humans are equated in the advent of generative art.
The methodology encrypted in generative art is inherently alienating towards the humans that interact with it. They are specifically alienated from the natural world as well as the foundational modes of art. This is because the primary creative work is performed by the machine, rather than the biological human, it’s part of the natural world, and her touch directly. The mediation between the programmer, program–machine, and the user is itself multiple levels removed from the natural world in the mission to create an image. Some disagree with this notion, seeing the multitudinous aspect of generative arts as capable of pushing humanity towards unexplored creative endeavors within generative art practice, as well as seeing its ubiquity as being a positive appearance in usage outside of fine art, such as in education or graphic design. Contrarily, to the consumer, the entire process is ultimately a destructive, energy-demanding, exhaustive experience that ultimately dehumanizes and alienates her.
