Art in the Time of the Artificial

I n February 1965 when the first exhibit of computer art opened at the study gallery at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, showing a small selection of plotter drawings by Georg Nees 111, uneasy feelings emerged among the audience. Was this supposed to be art, if it was true that a computer had produced the works? To what extent was the computer the creator? To a considerable degree, the audience consisted of artists from the Stuttgart area. Max Bense, the philosopher who had arranged the show [21, felt obliged to cool down the disturbance by stressing a distinguishing line between art as a purely human activity and art produced by computer. The latter he called artificial art (kiinstliche Kunst); thus, he coined a new concept. It is obviously unnecessary to stress the fact that art is human-made, i.e. artificial. The word “art” itself carries this connotation. When Bense used the combination of art as a purely human activity and art produced by computer, he implied that there was a very real possibility of having something like an artificiality of a second order. Supposedly, he was implicitly referring to artificial intelligence. Now, art has always been artificial, and it is ridiculous to assume anything different. Nowhere in nature do we encounter works of art, and it is only after art had become an important facet of human culture that we discovered aesthetics in nature. We discover it by projection and interpretation only. And yet, compared to art created by the machine, traditional art appears to be natural. In this view, we take what we do without the help of a machine as natural, thus opening up a domain of artificiality for the machine. Artificial art then becomes a synonym for machine art, i.e. art that is created through a process of the partial delegation of human activities to a machine. There is nothing terribly shocking about artists delegating some of their activities to someone else, even if delegated to a mechanical or electronic machine. Indeed, many artists have been clever managers in distributing labor to their employees. When software takes the place of the artist, or of his or her helpers, however, the question of who or what is the creator shows up: the artificiality of art. Bense very much liked the idea of generating aesthetic objects with the aid of computers because this could prove the point of information aesthetics. Information aesthetics was the heroic attempt by Bense and Abraham A. Moles [3] to use Shannon’s and Weaver’s concept of information [4] as the guiding principle for an analysis of aesthetic processes, both analytic and generative. Although some exciting insight into the nature of aesthetic processes was gained this way, the attempt failed miserably. Nothing really remains today of their theory that would arouse any interest for other than historical reasons. The failure of information aesthetics is due to its most fascinating starting point: the radical idea of an aesthetics of the object. All subjectivism was to be banned from aesthetics: the focus was to be on measure rather than value judgment, number rather than feeling, mathematics rather than psychology. An aesthetics of the object was supposed to produce methods of measuring the object such that a quantitative feature vector would replace the aesthetic object in any matter of value judgment. Information aesthetics failed when it became clear that information was no objective measure, but rather a subjective construct. The constructivist notion of information as an emerging quality when systems adapt to their environment turned information aesthetics into an extreme case of European scientific imperialism. But one concept remains that was central to information aesthetics: the concept of the aesthetic object as a sign, i.e. as a semiotic entity. This great assumption has gained tremendously in importance. Information aesthetics was turned into a semiotic aesthetics, borrowing the term and concept of “sign” from Charles S. Peirce, the well-known American philosopher [5]. Bense was one of the very first in Europe to understand the great importance of Peirce’s work for any communicative processes-and art is a process of communication.