Aaron, with Decorative Panel, 1992
"AARON would always need to know what it was doing, and the key to what it would be able to do would always be constrained by the ways it would represent, internally, what it had already done. "
For those of you unfamiliar with the work of AARON, let me first show you some examples of the work, and ask yourself this often asked question: but is it ART?
Meeting on Gauguin's Beach, 1988
Liberty and Friends, 1985
Theo, 1992
(Detail) One of the Young Ladies Grew Up ans Moved to Washington. 1980
4 comments:
This is a very interesting article. If you think about it, you start to question your reasoning. It is not at all a simple question!
So, instead of answering, if this is an art, I would assume it to be art and ask who is the artist! This might give a clear answer to if this is an art or not. I will then claim- Reductio ad absurdum! :)
So, assuming it to be art, the nominees for artist are - "software AARON" and Harold Cohen (the guy who created AARON).
I say it is Harold Cohen. After all he wrote the program with *clear instructions*, *step by step rules* for AARON to paint.
If you are a believer in some form of God, you might argue that by my logic even Picasso, Duchamp, et al are not artists since God created them, hence God is the only artist.
But then shouldn't the possibilities of expression, and creativity to go *beyond the mechanical aspect involved in painting* be indispensable requirement?
I would also add another point here.
Lets say an alien comes visiting us and sees Francesca painting something beautiful. (Assuming aliens have some sense of beauty.)
The alien sees the brush stroke, colors mixed by intricate movements of hand, and concludes that Francesca's hand is the artist! Which is ridiculous right?
Mind is the true artist!
And after reading about AARON, I could not find signs of "mind" in it- only reactions, based on complicated rules created by Harold Cohen!
I once had a printer with really bad inkjet. When I tried to print anything, it would spit out inks everywhere. To me it looked like some abstract composition. Maybe my printer was an artist afterall :)
The surprising in this is that the paintings are made using the tool that you have not heard about. Once you spend some time understanding that it is still human's rules generating paintings using an algorithm created by a human, on a computer made by a human, it is not surprising any more.
On the other hand there is a quote ["I don't tell it what to do. I tell it what it knows, and IT decides what to do."] that really surprised me.
Let me explain. "It decides" are too "romantic" words in this case. According to wikipedia's article about AARON, "AARON cannot learn new styles or imagery on its own, each new capability must be hand-coded by Harold Cohen ...".
So there is no thinking process. It is just another image generator with a long history of "teaching it" - for more than 37 years...
I think it can be considered art, made exclusively by Harold.
P.S. Harold has been writing the program for more than 37 years and the source code is still not available for public.
I would also say that the software AARON is actually the art.
Wow! OK, so at first I was thinking that what we were looking at was someone's art, but I would also have to agree that Harold cohen is the true artist here. He actually created the program when then allowed AARON to do what he does. I still like the paintings though.
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