There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

#61

Post by atum47 » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 5:08 AM UTC

watercooler_guy wrote: post #60

atum47 wrote: post #4

There was a time I was deeply involved in procedural generated art. Everything has changed since I started working. But hey, I got come pretty cool experiments from that fase. Like this one: https://victorribeiro.com/showFractal/

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Re: There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

#62

Post by ravi-delia » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 5:27 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #22

A lot of people seem to be missing the relevance of this critique to NFTs. It's actually uncannily prescient, politically and economically.

I guess I don't see how that's the case. In principle you could have had NFTs as soon as the printing press was invented; just sell thousands of prints while also selling the right to own all of them by writing names in a book. The critique is of computer generated art, not art that happens to pop up in the same paragraph as "computer".

Re: There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

#63

Post by goblin89 » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 7:07 AM UTC

Extrapolating the objection a la “this tool is too advanced!” to AI-generated art is a curious thought exercise.

Yes, that art might be created by a black box unconscious neural network, but there’re still minds who: developed algorithms, had a vision of an art project, put together training datasets, set up the software, filtered output, and finally published the resulting art in some context (or set up a publication pipeline).

This further prompts an exercise in how a single human artist in some ways can be described as a neural network—that takes external reality as input, runs it through some layers (the lens of one’s mind) and produces art as output—and, similarly, might not always deserve the entirety of the credit: there’s inevitably someone with good taste (a curator, a mentor, a community, etc.) who “set up” the artist, who first recognized artist’s work, who pestered the artist to publish (or dissuaded from publishing work that wasn’t so good), who helped artist get published and gain the confidence to produce more art, and so on.

Re: There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

#64

Post by gorgoiler » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 7:51 AM UTC

An artwork needs to engender emotion in others and it needs to be a focus for questioning, thinking and feeling.

The best way to get these properties is to make a physical object and to make it unique either through craftsmanship or artificial constraint (a limited edition print run, for example).

Unless constrained by the artist, machine generated works do not have the property of uniqueness. They produce something more like poetry — infinitely reproducible art in the form of pure data sculpted at the human scale.

A photograph when presented as a computer image consists of pure data: but is it art? Was it taken at a moment in time in the real world? The uniqueness and craftsmanship is right there in the process of capture.

Re: There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

#65

Post by vagrantJin » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 8:09 AM UTC

NotPavlovsDog wrote: post #19

klik99 wrote: post #16

From the article: "Questions like 'is a computer creative' or 'is a computer an artist' or the like should not be considered serious questions, period." Interesting that the concept that the computer is somehow doing the art itself, missing the point that a computer is a tool just like a paintbrush, was even around in '71. One wonders when the paintbrush was invented if people argued people should still finger paint,…

Professional art is whatever you can sell as such. What i find boring with western art is that it is completely dependent on the critic and the discourse statement, in text, that must accompany any "serious" work of art. Zen and objects created under that philosophy makes no distinction between "high" and "low" art. There are multiple other approaches outside of the western paradigm. The writer of the article is sell…

Any piece of work that does not speak for itself, i dont consider art.

The works of the great masters can be appreciated even by children. They speak for themselves.

Re: There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

#66

Post by deltron3030 » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 8:26 AM UTC

NotPavlovsDog wrote: post #19

klik99 wrote: post #16

From the article: "Questions like 'is a computer creative' or 'is a computer an artist' or the like should not be considered serious questions, period." Interesting that the concept that the computer is somehow doing the art itself, missing the point that a computer is a tool just like a paintbrush, was even around in '71. One wonders when the paintbrush was invented if people argued people should still finger paint,…

Professional art is whatever you can sell as such. What i find boring with western art is that it is completely dependent on the critic and the discourse statement, in text, that must accompany any "serious" work of art. Zen and objects created under that philosophy makes no distinction between "high" and "low" art. There are multiple other approaches outside of the western paradigm. The writer of the article is sell…

There is no professional art imo, the professionalism makes it design. Art and design are opposites. In its purest form the former is about expressing yourself, the latter about resonating with others. If you create "art" with the intention for it to resonate with others (e.g. to make money selling it) you're designing.

Re: There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

#67

Post by Talanes » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 8:36 AM UTC

NotPavlovsDog wrote: post #19

klik99 wrote: post #16

From the article: "Questions like 'is a computer creative' or 'is a computer an artist' or the like should not be considered serious questions, period." Interesting that the concept that the computer is somehow doing the art itself, missing the point that a computer is a tool just like a paintbrush, was even around in '71. One wonders when the paintbrush was invented if people argued people should still finger paint,…

Professional art is whatever you can sell as such. What i find boring with western art is that it is completely dependent on the critic and the discourse statement, in text, that must accompany any "serious" work of art. Zen and objects created under that philosophy makes no distinction between "high" and "low" art. There are multiple other approaches outside of the western paradigm. The writer of the article is sell…

>The writer of the article is selling a monetary-driven agenda

Did we read entirely different articles? The one posted above is very much a creed against money-driven fads among artists.

Re: There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

#68

Post by Talanes » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 9:05 AM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #13

tgv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of Pollock's works? Until I saw a drip paining in a museum, I always thought it was a dull, lifeless, messy Kindergarten style, but the actual work was quite impressive in its sheer physical presence. It was rather different from the usual pictures in books and magazines. Seeing Mondriaan (or: Mondrian, as he's known in the English speaking part of the world) was different: his paintings look great in books, bu…

Here is the example: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1e/b2/b9/1eb2b9a2d656762f8bed... I agree that when printed on very large canvas and under proper lighting it can evoke some impression but the same would go for some computer generated art under similar conditions.

No print has the same physical presence as being able to see the layering of the paint on canvas. It's not a fully 2D medium.

Re: There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

#69

Post by iamacyborg » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 9:12 AM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #55

iamacyborg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software doesn’t contribute anything it wasn’t programmed to contribute, is my point.

Neither is the brush.

Correct, but no one tries to claim that the brush made an art work.

Re: There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

#70

Post by iamacyborg » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 9:24 AM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #52

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #22

A lot of people seem to be missing the relevance of this critique to NFTs. It's actually uncannily prescient, politically and economically.

and similar to NFTs the artists involved in early computer art also faced harassment "Indifferent as many critics and curators were, there were some responses to computer art that were considerably more severe. In fact, computer art has aroused the kind of extreme resentment that characterized many of the idolatry controversies scattered through the history of art. Beyond the sabotaging of computers, physical attacks…

> All sounds very similar to whats happening to a lot of artists thanks to Memo Akten's cryptoart.wtf name and shame site.

I don’t think that’s fair. Artists should be aware of the impact of their work and that site served to educate a great number of people on the ecological harm of NFT art.

That isn’t to say that those artists deserve to be harassed about it though.