Transdisciplinary cooperations and autonomous creativities

[This is the lecture the author gave at the Future Tense Symposium 3.0, held at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine, 27 April 2024]

1. Autonomous Creativities

Autonomous creativity in the arts has been recurring since the dawn of human expression. In times of Generative Artificial Intelligence, and to the goals of this presentation, we can consider Generative Art as a precedent for Generative AI based art forms. According to Philip Galanter:

Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy, contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art. [1]

Some years later, Margaret Boden and Ernest Edmonds wrote that:

In Generative art, the artwork is generated, at least in part, by some process that is not under the artist’s direct control. [2]

In its broader meaning, Generative Art includes visual, textual, sonic, and audiovisual art forms generated through many kinds of more or less autonomous systems and processes: mechanical, electronic, computer-based, biological, natural, etc. Among the artists that are considered precursors are Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Michael Noll, Hans Haacke, and Vera Molnár (who died in December 2023). An exhibition on this extraordinary artist was performed at the Beall Center in 2022.
Vera Molnár considered the computer to be deeply human. Once she said:

I think that there is nothing more human than a computer because it was invented by men. […] Thus, the most human art is made by computer, because every last bit of it is a human invention. [3]

Harold Cohen, one of the pioneers of Generative Art, highlighted the evolution of the computer’s role. In an interview, he said:

My whole history with information technology has had to do with a shift in the notion of the computer as an imitation of the human being, towards a recognition of the computer as an independent entity with its own capabilities, fundamentally different from those we have. [4]

With the advent of Generative AI, Generative Art experiences a second youth. Many exhibitions are open worldwide, like the retrospective dedicated to Harold Cohen that is running just now at the Whitney Museum.

2. Generative Artificial Intelligence and the relationship between text and picture

As we know, in generative AI a text, the prompt, can be transduced into a picture, a song, or a video. An instance of human culture, made of a huge amount of data, feeds the algorithms. The correspondence between the text and the picture depends on the dataset on which the generative AI is trained and on the release of the software, and the final results can be very different. The same text/prompt, even with the same algorithm and dataset, can originate different pictures, and this is more evident using different generative AI applications.

This process in AI making pictures is similar to what happens to humans: the same sentence is imagined in different ways by different people, depending on a large number of variables: context, culture, language, knowledge, ways of expression, the current condition of the people, etc. Secondly, in generative AI the process of picture creation is not under control. Painting, 2D digital drawing, and 3D modeling, are works in progress, with the artists having almost complete control of all stages leading to the final picture. In generative AI, even with the most descriptive and seemingly complete prompt, the final image is just one possible representation of the idea; the outcome can be unexpected, like a surprise. This control is similarly lacking when trying to create with generative AI a copy of an existing picture, unless it is a very famous one.

This happens because texts and images are very different ways to represent, with different purposes; therefore, the text-image match can’t be univocal. And this should bring to consideration in a different way the so called “prompt engineering.”

3. Creative autonomy outside the digital realm

But creative autonomy does not only pertain to digital-based devices, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. In the installation Chronolalia. Towards an oscillating truth, by Austrians Klauss Spiess, Emanuel Gollob, Paul Gründorfer, and Jens Hauser, Artificial Intelligence is not used to create images but to generate sounds from the interaction between the human voice and the bacteria that naturally coexist in the oral and nasal cavities. [5] Oral language does not only consist of mechanical vibrations generated by the movement of the parts of the human speech system but also includes a broader biological substrate that involves the body and especially the populations of bacteria that are in the oral and nasal cavities. These bacteria are influenced by voice frequencies, which alter their environment both through the movement of parts of the mouth and through the acoustic vibrations (sounds) that are generated, which change the acoustic and physical conditions in which they live. Certain frequencies promote their multiplication; for example, the tonal part of the voice strengthens their cytoskeleton and increases reproductive activity. Reciprocally, bacteria influence the sounds of speech by absorbing certain frequencies, [6] those that are most useful to them. Thus, in human vocalization, bacteria actively intervene between the vocal-linguistic pneumo-bio-mechanical activities and the sounds that are generated. Therefore, the sound of the human voice, such a personal element, is also the result of the interactions between the body and these microorganisms, that play an active role, or “microperformativity,” as Jens Hauser and Lucie Strecker have called it. [7]

In the installation Chronolalia. Towards an oscillating truth, one must speak, sing, or whisper into a microphone, possibly altering the rhythm, tone, and intensity. The vibrations generated by the voice are transmitted to a plate on the floor and then to the bioreactor containing the microbiome, which extracts the frequencies it can use best for its growth. These “vibrational needs” are then sent to a vocal articulator that emits the filtered voice. If this voice is imitated in a way similar to an echo, enough data is provided to the Deep Learning process to constantly adapt vocal frequencies to the microbiome’s needs. Together with the voices of previous users, a polyphonic, vibrational, hybrid chorus of a new interspecies intelligence is created, combining microbial and anthropovocal interests—a kind of meta-organism.

This installation also presents a multi-perspective and less anthropocentric vision of life, and the idea of the biological realm as a deeply interconnected and mutually collaborative continuum.

4. Third Life and the Externalization Process. Towards an Art for the Non-Human?

Today Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Synthetic Biology, Genetic Engineering, Biotechnology, are simulating, emulating, and expanding the idea of life and evolution. Many artifacts, devices, and machines are becoming increasingly powerful and autonomous, presenting behaviors that are similar to living beings’ ones. Scientific research can modify existing organisms and create new ones that would have never evolved. Humanity is witnessing the extension of life to a complex landscape with organic, inorganic, and mixed living forms. Some sort of “Third Life” originating from human culture, expands Nature from within its own domain. “Third Life”, being the “First Life” the biological life, and the “Second Life” the life in the symbolic dimension. [8]

This process is consistent with a more general process of progressive externalization outside the body of human functions and activities, [9] underway since the dawn of humanity. Through simple tools used as utensils and weapons, human culture began to externalize parts and activities of the body. Then, with pictures and writing, humanity started to record knowledge and memory outside the body. Then, with the use of more or less automatic machines and devices, humanity could externalize physical work and many related activities. Finally, with Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Artificial Life, narrow reasoning abilities and autonomous actions have been externalized. If this trend continues in the future, an increasing number of more and more complex human activities will be externalized, and the outcomes of human culture will become increasingly independent, evolving, as noted before, into the Third Life. Transdisciplinarity and complexity are at the basis of imagining, participating in, and designing such an evolution.

The process of externalization is also underway in the arts. Initially, it involved simple devices to assist artists, but with scientific and technological advances, increasingly autonomous systems have emerged, raising, among others, the issue of “art made by machines.” The process of externalization does not diminish the human presence and responsibility in art; at most, it reduces the human intervention in the creation of the work of art. [10]

Is it possible to extrapolate the externalization process further towards art forms not intended for humans but for technologically advanced devices? Art is deeply embedded in the essence of humanity, so what sense can an “art of the machines for the machines” have? Could the technologically advanced devices get some sort of aesthetic sensibility? Does it make sense an art for the “non-human”? How will it be created, recognized, evaluated, and disseminated? Will there still be anything human in this extreme externalization?

Denisa Půbalová, Lea Luka Sikau, Michael Artner and Julia Wurm have tried to provocatively answer these questions with the installation Ars for Nons (“Ars for Nonhumans”), inviting people to sit in a waiting room while their smartphones participate in an interactive event involving sounds, vibrations, and images. They write:

The installation Ars for Nons creates art for technology – which essentially is a part of society already. Art is not made by nonhuman technology for humans, but with technology for nonhumans. It asks why and how to create art for other-than-human beings. Ars for Nons creates a space for nonhumans, Nons, to immerse in Ars, an interactive art piece. The installation is conceptualised for […] smartphones. Every phone inhabits their own white cube to conceive and contribute to an art installation consisting of sound, vibration, and imagery. In the meantime, the accompanying human waits. Ultimately, the installation stretches the human perspective, deconstructing and rethinking our relationship with art. [11]

Thank you for your attention.

Notes

1) Philip Galanter, “What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory,” International Conference on Generative Art, 2003, online, https://www.philipgalanter.com/downloads/ga2003_paper.pdf (last access 15/09/23). [back]

2) Margaret A. Boden, Ernest A. Edmonds, “What is generative art?”, Digital Creativity, vol. 20, n. 1-2, 2009, p.10, DOI: 10.1080/14626260902867915 (last access 10/02/24). [back]

3) Vera Molnár in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist”, in Hans Ulrich Obrist, András Szánto (eds.), Bookmarks: Revisiting Hungarian Art of the 1960s and 1970s, Cologne/New York, Koenig Books, 2018, p. 80. [back]

4) Harold Cohen, 2011, in Alex Estorick, “Quando il pittore ha imparato a programmare: AARON di Harold Cohen”, Flash Art, 26/02/18, online, https://flash—art.it/article/quando-il-pittore-ha-imparato-a-programmare-aaron-di-harold-cohen/ (last access 07/09/23). [back]

5) https://ars.electronica.art/who-owns-the-truth/en/chronolalia/ (last access 13/10/23). [back]

6) Klaus Spiess et al., “Microbial Keywording. Towards material speech acts”, Performance Research, vol. 25, n. 3, 2020, online, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13528165.2020.1807755 (last access 25/10/23); Klaus Spiess, Maximilian Hauptmann, Lucie Strecker, “Entangled Speech. Speaking through oral microbes”, Performance Research, vol. 25, n. 5, 2020, online, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13528165.2020.1882208 (last access 25/10/23). [back]

7) Jens Hauser, Lucie Strecker, “On Microperformativity”, Performance Research, vol. 25, n. 3, 2020, pp.1-7, online, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13528165.2020.1807739 (last access 25/10/23). [back]

8) On the concept of “Third Life” see my texts: “From life to life. The multiplicity of the living”, in Roy Ascott, Gerald Bast, Wolfgang Fiel, Margarete Jahrmann, Ruth Schnell (eds.), New Realities: Being Syncretic, Wien, Springer-Verlag, 2009, pp. 56–59; “Declinations of the living: Toward the Third Life”, in Dmitry Bulatov (ed.), Evolution Haute Couture. Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age, Kaliningrad, BB NCCA, 2013, pp. 50–63; “Art as a philosophy of contemporaneity. Poetics of complexity, Third Life, locality and universality”, in Pier Luigi Capucci, Giorgio Cipolletta (eds.), The New and History. art*science 2017 Conference Proceedings, Ravenna, Noema Media & Publishing, 2018, pp. 49–62, ebook, https://noema.stores.streetlib.com/it/pier-luigi-capucci-giorgio-cipolletta-eds/the-new-and-history/ (last access 30/10/23). [back]

9) Pier Luigi Capucci, “Outsourcing Life,” in Proceedings, 81(1), 57, 2022, https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/81/1 (last access 07/07/23). Lecture presented at the symposium “Theoretical and Foundational Problems in Information Studies,” Duke University, September 2021, https://tfpis.com (last access 07/07/23). The proceedings: Marcin J. Schroeder, Mark Burgin (eds.), The 2021 Summit of the International Society for the Study of Information Proceedings, MDPI, 2022, online, https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/81/1 (last access 05/07/23). [back]

10) Pier Luigi Capucci, “Perspectives et visions de l’art” in Ligeia, n. 200–204, January–June 2023, dossier “Art & Futur” edited by Hervé Fisher. Also online, https://www.cairn.info/revue-ligeia-2023-1.htm (last access 05/07/23). [back]

11) Lea Luka Sikau (ed.), Ars for Nons. Welcome to the waiting room, Linz, Ars Electronica, 2022, p. 3. [back]