Hand In Hand: AI Art and Creativity

Inspired by Harold Cohen: AARON, this program brings together artists who are using artificial intelligence (AI) to produce work across a range of mediums, including painting, photography, and performance. Following short presentations about their working methods and tools, the conversation focuses on how AI can enable new forms of creativity and artistic agency while also addressing its corporate structures and critical blind spots. Speakers include Beth Coleman, Bennett Miller, Mimi Ọnụọha, and David Salle. Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s Curator of Digital Art, moderates the conversation.
Beth Coleman is an artist and writer who works across locations of text, sound, and visuality, playing with frequencies of a generative aesthetic.
Bennett Miller is an Academy Award-nominated director whose current work in visual art links the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) with the history of the photographic image.
Mimi Ọnụọha is a Nigerian-American artist whose work deploys choice moments of seeming absence to question and expose the contradictory logics of technological progress.
David Salle is a painter and a writer.

[@whitneydesignlabs8738]

Great presentation! Thanks to the presenters, and thanks to the Whitney museum for exhibiting Harold Cohen's work. I worked for Harold as a young man building a robotic arm with Harold's goal to transition from b&w plotter output to full color painting output.

[@JeffreyGreenbergTechArt]

I worked directly with Harold as a graduate art student and I wrote the early versions of the software that runs the plotters. (My work is credited in the Brooklyn show credit which is in the Whitney show, and he also gave me an Aaron drawing which he tributes to me and signed.) His work is not the same technology we call AI today (machine learning neural nets). What he did we came to be call to "expert systems" but at the time was a form of introspection that Harold engaged in and then translated into code based on his ideas of representation and of how he contemplated his own art making. The drawings have his "hand" in it, the marks are how he drew. You can see it in his amazing hand drawn notebooks as well.
For context, he not only wrote the Aaron software on early UNIX machines but also designed the drawing machines and did the hardware. At the time, his work was so ahead of what was going on, and computers were not in wide use at all. A book was written early on (McCordrick) but critics at the time had no understanding of what they were seeing, taking it solely as painting, when in some sense, his art was in the code itself and in the process of his introspection and questions about his art and making "meaningful" drawings, not only in the visual outcome. In conversations I had with him, he foresaw Aaron continuing after his death...

[@whitneydesignlabs8738]

Hi Jeffrey, I also worked directly with Harold in the water tank studio about 1987-1991. I was a high school kid and later in college when I worked for Harold. He hired me to build the robot arm in an attempt to go from drawing to painting in color. Maybe we were in the studio at the same time? If so, I would like to talk to you. When I worked there, I recall a grad student that Harold had hired to help with the coding, but I don't remember their name. It might have been you. Were Nina or Linda the colorists in the studio when you were there? BTW, my wife and I had the pleasure of visiting the Whitney last month to see the HC exhibit. It was fantastic.

[@kjmav10135]

I came into this with my prejudices against AI and art as it is commonly used to steal other artist’s work. But then I listened, hoping you would change my mind. Theft of other people’s work with absolutely no credit or awareness of their identity, even, is unacceptable. I’m about a half hour in, and the first artist is using machine learning about burial sites with art as commentary on AI. That’s ethical. However-the sepia images in the AI photographs are stolen. The next guy-how can we train AI to steal other artist’s work with more nuance and panache? How do I help this machine steal from Arthur Dove? And so, yes. This is what I thought it would be. Worst suspicions confirmed. I hate this.