Status Update #3: AI, Creativity and Band Photos
On Botto, IT-Artists, and the Future of AI Art
I believe I've forgotten to mention until now that I'm in a band. Sometimes I forget this myself. It came back to me because Berlin Art Week just happened. A band member from Paris was in town because she has her first solo exhibition at Wentrup. Unfortunately, I haven't been there yet. I'm slowly catching up on all the exhibition visits.
I started this weekend on Lindenstraße. Galerie Russi Klenner is showing Adam Lupton with "Soliloquy" in the temporary project space. It's about loneliness and isolation in modern society, about fears and compulsions, from what I gather from the exhibition text. The large painting "Heart Cooks Brain" makes me nostalgic. I think I actually bought all the albums on CD back then that Lupton painted. Today, I wish I had bought vinyl records. A few houses down at Soy Capitan, Rachel Youn's kinetic sculptures are running in the exhibition "Pleasure Circuit". Somehow, I'm reminded of a gym because so much is kept in motion with a goal that doesn't look like much fun. The exhibition text poses a question that still occupies me: "In what ways do anthropomorphized machines that simulate acts of care and service mirror parasocial relationships with laboring bodies?"
And a few doors further down, Persons Projects is showing Mikko Rikala with "So Little Changed, So Little Remained". The title makes me nostalgic again as I enter. It's about time and memory, which is no surprise. I particularly liked an ongoing series titled "Silence". The artist records his presence in various locations in nature for an hour. Of course, I asked if one could listen to the recordings. I was told that this was generally not intended.
Ok, I'll finish the story about the band. In 2021, I was at an opening, unexpectedly met some artist friends, someone suggested taking a group photo, so we took a group photo. Someone shouted: You look like a band. We took that seriously and quickly determined who plays which instrument. Over dinner, we agreed on the band name: Not Golden Table. A reference to Silverchair. We set up an Instagram account, opened a WhatsApp group, downloaded various apps, and had our first band practice that same evening in the restaurant. The next day, we already had our logo, designed by Manuel Rossner, and the first T-shirts went to print, with a motif by Evgen Čopi Gorišek. That's the advantage when a band consists of artists: a lot can be done in-house. The disadvantage: there's never time for band practice. And so, since that day, we've been reminding ourselves at irregular intervals that we're a band and urgently need to practice. The members, by the way, are: Desire Moheb-Zandi, Evgen Čopi Gorišek, Ry David Bradley, Manuel Rossner, and myself.
Yesterday, Friday, I was in Hanover for a few hours because I didn't want to miss Mario Klingemann and Boris Eldagsen meeting for the first time on a panel about AI. We forgot to take a photo of them after the panel. We remembered in the restaurant, Mario Klingemann had just enthusiastically ordered pork knuckle, so Eldagsen and I went looking for a location. Only the stairs to the basement were suitable, and so now there's something like a band photo of Mario Klingemann and Boris Eldagsen with 70s or 90s New York vibes. Of course, I suggested that the two could actually make music together using AI. They politely ignored my suggestion.
On the panel at the Kestner Gesellschaft, the two got along very well, because Klingemann and Eldagsen were, I believe, never of the same opinion. In 2018, I met Klingemann in person for the first time; he was a Google Arts and Culture resident in Paris at the time. Since then, I've been introducing Klingemann as Germany's most important AI artist, and I stand by that even seven years later. With Botto, he has confirmed this in my opinion, but more on that in a moment. Internationally, he stands alongside Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Sougwen Chung, Niceaunties, Sasha Stiles, Linda Dounia, and Lawrence Lek, to name just a few artists doing impressive work with AI.
Boris Eldagsen has become one of the best-known thinkers and artists on the topic of AI after declining the Sony World Photography Award in April 2023 because AI art is not photography. He has thereby initiated an important debate, which he constructively continues to pursue, which is urgently needed on this topic.
And so the two also thought about and discussed AI constructively on the panel, albeit, as mentioned, with little agreement. The common thread was the topic of AI and creativity. Eldagsen described future collaboration with AI as augmented creativity. He also painted a somewhat bleak picture of the future: at some point, he said, one would have to prove on the internet that one is human, because the internet would then consist almost entirely of AI-generated content. Klingemann said: "Creativity is not creation. Creativity is search." He calls his own way of working "information recycling". And after figuring out for himself over many years how to become an artist who is introduced as an artist on a panel, he asked himself: Can one create an artificial artist?
Since 2021, there's been Botto, the artificial artist who, like an artist, must be able to support himself and therefore offers works for sale on the blockchain. This is going so well that Klingemann can no longer even afford Botto's works himself, he told me. In three weeks, by the way, Botto will have his first solo exhibition at Sotheby's in New York, and Klingemann will be there.
On the panel, Klingemann shared an insight: One must believe in an artist like a religion. That's why he describes Botto as a trinity. The blood is the currency, namely the Botto currency. The brain is the AI, and the heart is the DAO. Botto constantly creates works, humans decide - the members of the DAO - which works are sold, and they are compensated for this. "Botto is extremely populist and tries to cater to taste," says Klingemann. Botto learns what people like and orients itself to these judgments of taste.
Eldagsen, on the other hand, said that for him, art is not a product. As an artist, he must create and doesn't orient himself to the market; it doesn't interest him.
On the topic of AI and creativity, here are additional voices from artists.
In an interview with Forbes, Sougwen Chung, a Chinese-Canadian artist, widely considered a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration and one of four recipients of the TIME100 Impact award, and named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023, said:
"So, human-machine collaboration situates these ideas at the forefront — it recognizes that the dynamic between an artist and her technological tools is more complicated. There is an excitement in culture at the moment about 'A.I. art' and 'A.I. artists,' and I think it stems from an interest in understanding what the promises, potentials, and paranoias of A.I. are and could be. That being said, I find the false premises about A.I. creating art strange. It suggests this relinquishing of human agency and erasure of human labor. Which, for me, is not what is exciting or valuable about the artistic practice." – Sougwen Chung, Forbes, 2019
Photographer Charlie Engman has found a way to create images with AI that don't look like AI stock images. An essay by him titled "You Don't Hate A.I., You Hate Capitalism" has just been published in Art in America. In it, he writes, among other things:
"To the extent that AI diminishes creativity, it is that, in the eyes of the algorithm, the output of a conventional artist (a photographer, say) and the output of anyone else (a meme shit poster, say) have the same value; they differ only in register. AI is accelerating an ongoing institutional collapse of authorship and taste. The high-culture museum has been exploded into an open-air county fair, and the elites—the masters—are scrambling to retain their special status.
But who are the masters of this newly consolidated county fair?
A common thread in the critiques of AI is the fear that the machines are siphoning our creative energies to fuel their own activity." – Charlie Engman, Art in America
Primavera de Filippi asks Sasha Stiles the following in an interview: Some argue that AI could potentially replace human creativity. What are your thoughts on this? Do you see AI as a collaborator or a competitor to human artists? Sasha Stiles answers with her usual eloquence:
"I’m interested in the entity or consciousness that emerges when humans and AI collaborate, each doing what the other can’t. I don’t see a car or a plane as a competitor to my legs; I view them as ways to augment my human abilities, to get to places I couldn’t visit on my own. Sometimes I just want to walk slowly through my garden and bask in the sunshine. But sometimes, I want to race around the world or back or forward in time or answer an impossible question. AI feels like an engine for my brain like electricity brightening a dim room. I don’t always need it, but it is revelatory, permanently changing how I see the world and my place in it." – Sasha Stiles, Alias Studio
Following the panel discussion in Hanover, the audience continued to discuss for a long time how the future with AI might look. I briefly recalled the interview with Eva & Franco Mattes, icons of early net art, who recently said the following in the Art Basel magazine:
"As artists, we cannot compete with the Internet’s super-fast, ever-changing flow of images, ideas, and stimuli. There’s no point in trying to re-create that speed, that energy. What we can do is select one thing and isolate it from the rest to produce a moment of reflection on these processes – even if only for a minute." – Eva & Franco Mattes, Art Basel
This can perhaps also be applied to working with AI.
And Elke Buhr, editor-in-chief of Monopol, talked about It-Artists on 3sat, using the example of 3-year-old Laurent Schwarz. Many AI artists are certainly It-Artists, like It-Girls, celebrities of the moment, good marketing, nice pictures for the wall, but not artists who create works that will go down in art history.
Otherwise, I'm taking all other topics with me into STATUS UPDATE #4, including my anticipation for Sally Rooney's new book. Yes, I'm one of those people who enjoy reading Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh. In TIME, by the way, Kate Dwyer is certain that there will never be another Sally Rooney. So for those who don't want to know in detail what "Intermezzo" is about, I can recommend this text. Warning: in the Guardian, the book is retold almost in detail. I would have wished for a spoiler warning.
Never saw a Botto piece I loved. Could a Botto beat a Jon Burgerman or a John Lupton?
Never!
But yes. Artists sharpen the new tools.
Thank you for your effortless wonderful style of writing.
More of it!
Love this, Anika! I thought I subscribed a while ago but turns out I didn't, so I'm subscribed now and catching up reading through past updates. They're fantastic and a breath of fresh air!