Ask for a Constable of Times Square and one is likely to get-well, confusion, almost the aesthetic equivalent of a program spitting out an “undefined value” error. Ask for a Constable interior, and one may get cows or sheep in a library. Then one realizes that, for an art-making machine, style is inextricable from the subject matter that it usually superintends. For instance, we typically talk about artistic style as a function or feature separate from the subjects of art: the Impressionist style is a way of painting, and the objects it attaches to-haystacks, or picnics, or Paris boulevards-are just instances of what the style can act on.
Art-trained systems like Midjourney and DALL-E 2 might, in turn, help us look more clearly at our own art-making. Chess programs isolate the specific role of memory in chess. One of the things that thinking machines have traditionally done is sharpen our thoughts about our own thinking. We talk about them being haunting, entrancing, unforgettable. We don’t talk about pictures being persuasive, convincing, pointed. That’s not a weakness of images as a language of communication but a strength, and we’ve evolved a set of words that expresses their peculiar power to cast a spell without making a point. It takes an extraordinary scaffolding of wit to explicate a single image of wonder. Surrealism is the default condition of the narrative image.
The same thing occurs with ancient Mithraic friezes (basically, chiselled graphic novels), or even Athenian vases, whenever the specific story is lost. This happens to every student of Renaissance art who encounters a picture of an unfamiliar saint: What does that palm leaf mean? In Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” the agitated language of hands would mean nothing-who’s pointing at what, and why?-without our knowing the story in advance. When you don’t know the story, even tutelary religious pictures become enigmatic. Even images made to persuade-such as propaganda posters or altarpieces-are only communicative through the intercession of our outside knowledge of the narratives that they illuminate. To be persuasive, a text demands a point in contrast, looking at pictures, we can be fascinated by atmospheres and uncertainties. That’s why the images that DALL-E 2 makes are far more interesting than the texts that A.I. And the power of images lies less in their arguments than in their ambiguities. (Whether actual machines like it played a significant role in the art of Vermeer or Rembrandt is an unsettled question.)īut systems like DALL-E 2 don’t operate on light and shadow they operate on art history-on the almost bottomless reservoir of images on which they’re trained. It took for granted that the task of image-making was to incise and adjust a drawing to a pattern of light-in itself, a fiendishly difficult action that preoccupied artists for centuries.
I once owned a French drawing device-a kind of camera lucida, with reflecting mirrors and refracting prisms-that called itself a Machine to Draw the World.
The intersection of new machines with new kinds of images has a long history. Is it like the invention of the electric light bulb or like the coming of the lava lamp? Herewith, some thoughts. image generation is startling the question, though, is whether its arrival is merely recreational or actually revolutionary. The range and ease of pictorial invention offered by A.I.
#I art view serial
thesis on modernism is now wildly overdue-is bound to find it compelling, and, indeed, addictive, and so he spends hour after hour on serial afternoons producing composite pictures, as the real-life Havanese stands guard below his desk. An image-soaked former art critic-one whose Ph.D. My Havedon is, of course, an image produced by an artificial-intelligence image generator- DALL-E 2, in this case-and the capacity of such systems to make astonishing images in short order is, by now, part of the fabric of our time, or at least our pastimes. The stark expression, the white background, the implicit anxiety, the intellectual air, the implacable confrontational exchange with the viewer-one could quibble over details, but it is close enough to count.
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