The Exploit of Art: AI and the Banality of Images

Grégory Chatonsky

Our guest author Grégory Chatonsky is an artist whose work has explored the possibilities of artistic expression with digital media since the mid-1990s. An ongoing subject in his practice is the exploration of Artificial Intelligence and particularly the concept of “artificial imagination,” which exposes the machine’s ability to produce content beyond human capabilities and push the limits of art. 

In this text, he presents a critique of the latest advances in artificial intelligence aimed at producing more realistic images, which may lead in turn to the banality of all images.

Gregory Chatonsky, from the Latents Diagrams series, 2022

Every week a new text-to-video generation and translation code becomes available on Colab [1]. We keep on experimenting, eager to produce new images and explore these new possibilities. We try to make them our own to avoid some of the visual naïveties that are spread daily on Twitter and Discord. But gradually the field of visual possibilities seems to be narrowing, with Dall-E 2 and affiliates [2]. By becoming more “credible”, the images also become more boring. The technological progression and the aesthetic motivation seem to go in opposite directions, as if each one had its own goals.

Undoubtedly, the codes developed by creative computer scientists, who most often have little knowledge of the history of art, meet requirements that are antagonistic to those of art. Computer practice consists in taking up challenges (exploits), in realizing objectives and in not questioning their presuppositions, so that one inherits more often than not an underlying ideological structure that tends to naturalize what is a social and cultural construction.

“The images in neural networks become more and more coherent, banal, until they strangely have a family air with those of Beeple.”

Thus, the generation of images in neural networks seems to have as a major objective the capacity to produce “natural” images from texts, i.e. images that seem to have been made by human operators with a technical mediation (painting, drawing, photography, etc.) and not generated by solitary machines. Inspired by Turing’s test, this finality conceals that this test took into account, in its two versions, its performative effects. Indeed, Alan Turing did not want the machine to be an intelligence like a human being (this faculty being moreover uncertain in the latter), but that the latter grants, affects, attributes to the machine an intelligence if he ignores that it is a machine. The recognition of the arbitrariness of the attribution is fundamental here, because it is what defines the conditions of possibilities which must be built and deconstructed.

Thus, the images in neural networks become more and more coherent, banal, until they strangely have a family air with those of Beeple. An average aesthetic fruit of the thoughtless juxtaposition of our culture, a latent space that can be statistical (technical) or cognitive (human). They seem to lose the strangeness of pixels and Surrealism, to repress their psychedelic or hallucinatory character of a Deep Dream [3], since it is a question of overcoming what appears as defects and oddities, so that one does not notice the difference between the alleged original and the alleged copy. One then sees only fire. In fact, there is nothing to see anymore, except a symptom of our time and its hypermnesia.

There is behind the computer exploit a generalized instrumentality, a deterministic construction of the world, which affects the aesthetics itself. It supposes here a linear conception of the representation, of the mimesis, of the Vorstellung: the images would not have effect on themselves. The images of Dall-E 2 seem less disturbing than those of Disco Diffusion or VQGAN Clip, so much they are mastered and normal. One becomes nostalgic for a technology that is only a few weeks old. The technological evolution is an instant ruin, at the very moment of its appearance it is a disaster. Gone are the germinations and the metamorphoses, the imperfections and the monstrosities. The silhouettes and the objects are cut out on a background, each thing is distinguished from the others, the image becomes clearer and more “credible”, but we know well that this credibility is not natural and that it does not go without saying, it is a cultural construction and historically, geographically located. 

“When neural networks will be able to generate an image that cannot be distinguished from a human creation, it will be because images created by humans have been transformed, in their biggest banality and instrumentality, as an aesthetic by default.”

But it is precisely in the contingency of this construction that the true work of art underlines, whereas the technological development of the generation of images rests on the belief of an essentiality of this one. Coders therefore often pursue a decontextualized and essentialized visual purpose. The original images are considered as data that must be translated. That the perception of these “original” images can be retroactively influenced by the automated productions remains unthought of. That the translation of a text into images belongs to a long Western theological tradition of making images express a sacred text is obscured. This is the reason why “prompts” are often more interesting than visual results. If we were to catalog all the “prompts” that flood Twitter [4], we would probably get a good representation of the visual imagination of our time: what words do people think of to make an image? They don’t see that the defects, the metamorphoses, the amorphous are so many aesthetic potentialities, that the strange familiarity between human and technical productions is also made of distances and differences consisting in an anthropo-technological gray zone: human and technical have always influenced each other, the imagination will have been the name of their meeting through a material support.

When neural networks will be able to generate an image that cannot be distinguished from a human creation, it will be because images created by humans have been transformed, in their biggest banality and instrumentality, as an aesthetic by default. While we believe to be producing new images, we will be in fact modifying the perception of all the past images to which we refer. Our technical present will influence our cultural past. Also, we will have forgotten that there is no human production that is not technical and no technical production that is not human. We will then be able to produce images as stereotyped as those of the influencers, of Beeple, of these instagrammable painters of which we do not know if it is the paintings or the faces which make their fleeting success. We will then be able to be submerged by the flow of images, to create images of images, to take up the thread of all our visual culture through the latent space of statistics. We will then find something to do and we will invent enough errors and shifts to continue experimenting.

Notes by the editor:

[1] Colaboratory is a tool that allows users to write and run code on Python using Google’s cloud services. It facilitates running complex tasks that would otherwise be difficult to process on a personal computer, and also share the code. 

[2] Dall-E is an AI system developed by Open AI that creates realistic images from a text description. Its first version was announced on January 5th, 2021. The second version was announced in April 2022, presenting spectacular results.

[3] Deep Dream is a computer vision program created by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev that was released in 2015 and became popular for its ability to create dream-like images based on algorithmic pareidolia.

[4] Some Text to Image AI projects invite Twitter users to send “prompts,” descriptions of the images they would like to see generated by the AI.

Alexandra Crouwers: “I want to preserve things that cannot be preserved”

Interview by Pau Waelder & Roxanne Vardi

Alexandra Crouwers is a visual artist working in the digital realm, and currently a doctoral artistic researcher in animation at KU Leuven/LUCA School of Arts, Brussels. She lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Her works can be described as collages, assemblages or dioramas. Crouwers’ animation and images are constructed with 3D software and post production, and bring attention to the balance between landscape and architecture, silence and sound, materiality and immateriality, technology and a broad sense of art history.

Diorama. The Plot: a day/night sequence, (2021) is featured in our recent artcast Anticlimactic, a selection of works from the eco-friendly NFT art community a\terHEN. The video work, based on a photogrammetric model of three tree stumps now called ‘The Plot,’ is part of Crouwers’ investigation of ways to deal with eco-anxiety and ecological grief.

Before discussing your artwork The Plot, can you tell us about the appeal of the unreal, and what brought you to research the concept of the diorama, which has become intertwined in your artistic practice?

I only realized that a lot of my work was, in fact, part of this whole concept of the diorama around five or six years ago. The field of special effects and visual illusions, and this sort of idea of simulated nature, simulated scenes, simulated wilderness has been lingering in my work for quite a long time. I think it’s also a part of where I grew up, in the Dutch countryside in the south. Since then I have been living in cities for most of my life. But as they say, you can take the girl out of the countryside, but you cannot take the countryside out of the girl. I noticed that I often start working by building a view, which I am lacking in the city. So there is a kind of innate longing for landscapes that are not there. This is connected to the idea of escapism; to escape from where you are at. The word nature has become very problematic: what we refer to as nature is quickly deteriorating in all kinds of senses. To me, simulating this idea of wilderness is like a twisted sense of digital nature, of purpose preservation. It is a way to deal with the idea of loss. Those are the things that connect to the idea of the diorama as a way to preserve something. The diorama is twofold: It’s the visual illusion that transports you (the immersion of a scene) and it’s the habitat.

In a sense, I have a very desperate practice as I want to preserve things that cannot be preserved. I want to go back in time to prehistory and the origins of image making. Decorated caves, such as the very beautifully preserved Dordogne, are also immersive spaces. It’s a multimedia installation that uses light and sound where a lot of the paintings almost seem to move with the surface. Thus, there is this idea of visual illusions also being a part of our whole history with image and the experience of image. Transporting pieces of my grandfather’s forest or plot to the digital X, Y, and Z axis by using photogrammetric models is, in a sense, a ritualistic way of transporting something from one realm to another. But visually, it’s very interesting, because from a distance, I am carrying out a sort of healing as a performative action, which I am interested in further exploring. The idea that technology is something very rational is absolutely not true. It’s like the illusion that people are rational or that they grow up. They never do. So I read and own some fantastic literature on that, specifically about the relationship between technology and for instance, spiritualism, like radio waves for example. These things are also connected into this fantasy science fiction world, which gives us really a lot of freedom to stretch a practice.

“The word nature has become very problematic: what we refer to as nature is quickly deteriorating in all kinds of senses. In a sense, I have a very desperate practice as I want to preserve things that cannot be preserved.”

You discussed the connection with prehistoric culture which gave us the first multimedia environment. In works such as The White Hide, (2012), Last Voices, (2017), and Millenial.spike, (2018) one can clearly see your interest in Neolithic culture. You also worked on two emoji proposals which are fantastic. Can you elaborate on how you work around those references and what they mean to you?

I think that there are some practical reasons for this. For instance, if you want to say something about the way that our brains work you have to go back into history, because otherwise you would not understand it. Going back into this, we realize that we are all one. The fact that those hand stencil cave paintings are found all over the globe is just amazing. It’s so fantastic that I really don’t understand why the emoji proposal was declined by the Unicode Consortium. The hand stencil is the first emoji, really. I think that one of the most amazing things that we have is this ability for making up stuff. The wider field of the arts is the habitat for making stuff up. The whole idea of fiction being the base of everything we do really is just quite amazing. On a cinematic level, I have always been incredibly influenced by science fiction films and the slowness of Stanley Kubrick. I learned all this 3d software by myself, and very quickly was simulating what big studios were doing. I have moved away from that a bit because it’s very time consuming, and also not always feasible. I like the fact that the visual language of the digital image has also exploded, and one can more or less use so many more types of digital imagery such as, for instance, the photogrammetric models.

Alexandra Crouwers. The White Hide, (2012).

Diving a bit deeper into The Plot, you said that it relates to your family history. At first glance, the work brings up notions of nature and the idea of eco anxiety. By reading this aspect of your family history one realizes that it is more personal, sentimental and experiential than might appear at first.

I am not entirely sure if that was the meaning. In hindsight I have been suffering from eco anxiety for 20 years. When I graduated from art school, we had to write a paper and I wrote a nonlinear story. It was written in separate sheets of paper, so the reader could decide in which order to read them. Everything that I am doing now is in there. It is, in essence, a science fiction piece. There are even aliens mentioned in there. But there is also a deep concern already about the temperature rising. Back then, people were already saying things like ‘oh, this is an unusually warm January’ or ‘oh, spring is coming’. But, I was already really very worried. In the paper that I wrote, I already questioned why people are so happy about this. In hindsight, I am not entirely sure where that exactly came from. I had been reading about it at the time, and I always watched a lot of disaster movies. Just as a sideline, there is research that proves that people who watch a lot of horror and disaster movies are much better equipped to deal with things like a pandemic. So, maybe it was because of all the disaster movies that I had been seeing as a child growing up near the German border. This eco anxiety completely predates even the idea of this forest being a part of my work. The first time I saw it after it was cleared I realized that it wasn’t even a forest, but a small monoculture plantation. Even though my whole family still refers to it as the little forest.

There is a sentimental reason that my mom has it now, and a very sentimental reason that my grandfather bought it in the first place. In the 1950s and 60s my grandfather was a farmer, and his family was forced to trade lands to make bigger plots. Moreover, the state was building a highway. Because my grandfather lost so much land that was originally built from family bits and pieces and patches here and there, which was the custom before the 1950s, he wanted to buy something back that actually related to his family history.

Alexandra Crouwers. Last Voices, (2017).

So by making this diorama you are in a way recovering the family plot. I was wondering whether these three trunks were left there or whether this is something that you asked for?

When I came there I saw the devastation, but there were these very tall birch trees and some pine trees still standing. Because the forest used to be so dense they just grew really tall and thin. Every time there is a storm more trees just blow over, which makes it even more dramatic. I don’t know if the forester had an aesthetic motivation to do that. But they were just there like a perfect monument. Moreover, the distance between the tree trunks gives them their own personality, and especially the tallest one, which is very much in decay at the moment. Usually, when I create my works I use the computer. I take an idea, and put it in a computer, but in this case, the plot actually dictates the work. In a dynamic sense, you need not interfere but just look at it.

You once wrote that a diorama usually has a distinct educational purpose as it tries to show us something that we otherwise would not be able to see. Even though we know that climate change is worsening we retreat to digital spaces as escapism. How much of that educational quality or bringing into sight is there in working with the dioramas?

As I am doing my PhD in art, it’s art and not science. The models are also used, for instance, in archaeological sites as documentation. It’s just that they happen to be very artistic or that I make them artistic. So it is in that sense documentation, but then I turn it into art. So they are educational when I talk about them. I regularly get invited to talk to students about ecology and activism and art and how to connect the art and the digital. So in that sense they also function as illustrations of how these things all come together.

In your work there is also a connection with the Romantic idea of the landscape and the ruin. Was this a conscious decision?

It’s interesting because the landscape in the Romantic era was meant to be so impressive that one would feel very small. In that sense, the romantic landscape works really well as a reference to the sublime. That also helps communicate the landscape, which itself is already a complex concept, because it is actually a cultural construct. I barely like to situate humans in my work. There is already too much centered on us. What we need is to experience the outside.

Alexandra Crouwers. Millenial.spike, (2018).

Given that this work was originally presented at a\terHEN, could you further elaborate on what drove you to exhibit your work on this platform and on your experience with NFTs in general?

When the NFT entered my field of view, I didn’t really know much more than most people who were reading a newspaper. So I think I only consciously registered the idea when Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days was sold. I was also not really sure what it had to do with my work. But at the time, I was giving a class to students in Brussels titled Digital Dimensions, and I thought to myself ‘well, this is a digital dimension, this is quite new’. So I started reading about it, and I read for about two weeks straight. Around the same time I also reunited with Kelly Richardson. We have become each other’s mirrors to bounce ideas off each other. I was also very happy to have found a place without all the clutter around it. There is a gap in people’s knowledge of the digital arts which can be a bit frustrating and that is something that NFTs might help to explain.

NYC TRANSFER Gallery + Niio @ Minnesota Street Project (SF)

[vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Summer in the City

We are big fans of Brooklyn based TRANSFER. Gallery founder/director Kelani Nichole, started the exhibition space nearly four years ago in order to support and and cultivate artists with computer-based practices through solo exhibitions, events and international art fairs.

This summer, Kelani and TRANSFER have migrated west, installing an outpost inside San Francisco’s brand new, highly anticipated, Minnesota Street Project.

TRANSFER DOWNLOAD @ Minnesota Street Outpost

The TRANSFER Download

Installed as a series of hyperlinked solo exhibitions,  ‘TRANSFER Download’ invites artists to present custom three-channel solo presentations of moving image. Each work is accessible via a playlist, creating a layered salon-style exhibition format first tested during Art Basel Miami in 2014. Selecting an artwork from the control screen changes over the entire installation space to feature a single work – formats include time-based narrative, generative 3D video, and looped moving images. 

TRANSFER + Niio

We’re thrilled to be collaborating with Kelani and TRANSFER during their debut at Minnesota Street. Niio, via its cloud platform + video player (4K/60fps) + remote control app,  will power a dedicated 4K 65″ single-channel screen featuring a collection of artworks from the gallery’s inventory which will give collectors an opportunity to take the Niio technology for a test drive while discovering new works of art.

Garden of Emoji Delights by Carla Gannis
Photo Credit: Kelani Nichole Instagram: “New toy from @niioart – upload on website, watch in 4K ??? @carlagannis ‘The Garden of Emoji Delights’ looks stunning ?”.

 Featured Artists Include:

Claudia Hart – ‘Empire’
Mary Ann Strandell – ‘Tromploi’
Rosa Menkman – ‘DCT’: Syphoning’
Phillip David Sterns – ‘Polar Visions 002’
Rick Silva – ‘Vibes Accelerationist’
Rollin Leonard – ‘Spinning Pinwheel of Death’
Laturbo Avedon – ‘Pardon Our Dust’

Check Out the Show:

July 30th – September 8th, 2016 in San Francisco

Minnesota Street Project
1275 Minnesota Street
San Francisco, CA
Open Tuesday – Saturday from 11am-6PM and by Invitation

Learn more about the Minnesota Street Project.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]