Core post 2: Algorithms in contemporary art

This summer, I happened to run an exhibition at the Hermitage Museum (Saint Petersburg, Russia) that was devoted to the appliance of artificial intelligence to art. All the works by artists from all over the world were based upon the same principle: an artist supplied an algorithm with data – in this particular case, with traditional pieces of art such as “classical” paintings; generators then analyzed that data and created new images (so basically this experiment falls under the rubric of "learning algorithms").

Here are some of the artifacts that I thought might be interesting to look at if we want to see how the appliance of “learning” algorithms works in contemporary art. They illustrate, in an interesting manner, some of Bucher’s insights too (e.g., “What a model learns depends on the examples to which it has been exposed.”)

1. “Memoirs from Latent Space” by Turkish artist Rafik Anadol: the artist trained the newest algorithm of the generative-adversarial network (GAN) in 1.3 million images of architectural photographic memories from the buildings of 9 architects and 11 different historic eras. The network analyzed them and generated unique (never existing) images of facades: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCC5GgakAeE&feature=youtu.be 

2. “The Belamy Family Portraits” by French art collective Obvious: the GAN studied 15,000 portraits painted by European artists from the 14th to the 20th century, and created new images based on this data. It is interesting that the GAN technology is based on interaction between “generator” and “discriminator” mechanisms: the former creates, the latter constantly compares new portraits with those by the generator searching for the unlikely; the generator’s task is to deceive the discriminator and make him think that a new image is a real portrait: https://obvious-art.com/gallery.html

3. “Summer gardens” by Italian artist Quayola: he filmed floral compositions manipulated by high winds, and employed computer algorithms to analyze motion, composition, and color schemes in these shots. The machine synthesized and processed macro shots to single out abstract paintings, and the result turned out to be something alluding to French impressionist paintings: https://vimeo.com/195022642

Since being exposed to these pieces of art, I’ve been haunted by the question – what is actually the creative process based on the interactivity of a human and a computer algorithm? And, as a follow up to Bucher’s piece, to what extent these methods include and depend on human decisions and choices?