Pages

Friday, November 17, 2017

CO.DESIGN on sounding real.
In fact, this computer-generated statement is itself an artwork called Variable by the Instanbul-based artist Selcuk Artut. At the press of a button, Variable generates a new artist’s statement for one of eight different screens. Each screen chooses a title for the art piece, like “movement,” “presence,” or “weakness,” and then each statement is concocted with a machine learning algorithm that was trained on the book Being and Time by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Artut writes that he was inspired by the book’s complexity; his algorithm remixes Heidegger’s text and transforms it into new meditations on the nature of being, an appropriate topic for contemporary art, which so often ponders the same questions. All the statements sound appropriately vague and baffling–just like actual artist statements.
It seems to me the postmodernism generator has been doing something similar with simple algorithms for a couple decades. Using machine learning for the same ends just consumes more energy -- carbon.

No comments:

Post a Comment