{"id":10520,"date":"2024-03-08T15:49:49","date_gmt":"2024-03-08T20:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/varnelis.net\/?p=10520"},"modified":"2024-03-20T12:45:49","modified_gmt":"2024-03-20T16:45:49","slug":"on-the-pictures-generation-and-ai-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/varnelis.net\/on-the-pictures-generation-and-ai-art\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Pictures Generation and AI Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
The other day, I posted some AI images of land art that doesn’t exist on Instagram. I didn’t have a plan for these, but I liked them and wanted to share them. In the comments, my friend the photographer Richard Barnes<\/a> wrote, “This is our new world which for the moment is totally reliant on the old one.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Richard is absolutely right and there is a lot to unpack in that sentence. To take one obvious reading, AI image generation is based on datasets of images on the Internet. You can read my extensive take on this in my last essay for this site, California Forever, Or the Aesthetics of AI Images<\/a>, but today, I want to tackle the issue of AI imagery and originality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My desire to make these images was backward-looking, or more properly, hauntological. Hauntology, a concept that emerged from the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, later popularized in cultural theory by Mark Fisher, suggests that the present is haunted by the unfulfilled potentialities of the past, creating a sense of nostalgia for lost futures that were never realized. Fisher writes: “What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.” (Mark Fisher, “What is Hauntology?<\/a>” Film Quarterly<\/em>, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), 16, article paywalled by JSTOR). For Fisher, much of recent culture is permeated by this hauntological quality, exploring historical references, styles, and ideas that never fully materialized in their own time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If this concept is unfamiliar, then take the show Stranger Things<\/em>. Set in the 1980s, not only does it explore the aesthetic and cultural motifs of that era, it revisits the past in ways that underscore the absence of the utopian visions once promised by that time. This is evident in the show’s theme song<\/a> by Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon (a.k.a. S U R V I V E<\/a>), informed by 1980s synthesizer music by musicians like Tangerine Dream, Giorgio Moroder, Jean-Michel Jarr\u00e9, Vangelis, and John Carpenter and performed on modular synthesizers and vintage synthesizers<\/a> from the 1970s. Through its retrofuturistic setting, supernatural elements, and cultural references, Stranger Things<\/em> effectively embodies this hauntological sentiment, appealing to audiences by conjuring a collective memory of a past both familiar and lost, a space where the promise of progress and the fear of what lies in the unknown are in constant dialogue, thereby reflecting our contemporary longing for a future that seems increasingly out of reach in the face of technological stagnation and political paralysis. Throughout the series, an alternate dimension called “the Upside Down” functions allegorically as a manifestation of hauntology, representing the shadowy underside of progress and the hidden costs of failed utopias. This parallel dimension, while mirroring the physical world, is engulfed in darkness, decay, and danger, embodying the repressed anxieties not only of teenage sexuality\u2014the familiar foundation of horror films\u2014but also of the pursuit of advancement without ethical consideration. It can be interpreted as the tangible realization of the lost futures Fisher describes, a space where the dreams of the past are not just forgotten but actively twisted into nightmares. This allegorical realm underscores the series’ exploration of the impact of scientific hubris and the disintegration of the social fabric, issues that resonate with contemporary anxieties about technological overreach and the erosion of social bonds. Through the lens of the Upside Down, Stranger Things<\/em> critiques the nostalgia for a past that never fully addressed these underlying tensions, suggesting that without confronting these spectral fears, they will continue to haunt us, impeding the realization of truly progressive futures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Being born in 1967, I was in high school in 1983, the year in which the first season of Stranger Things<\/em> is set, so I would have been older than the kids in Stranger Things,<\/em> but the showrunners, Matt and Russ Duffer (the Duffer Brothers) were born in 1984. There is something about the era just before one is born and in the years before one forms lasting memories, that triggers the hauntological sense, particularly in regard to its relation to the Freudian uncanny (the unheimlich<\/em>), which emerges not just as a theoretical concept but as a lived emotional reality, the encounter with something familiar yet estranged by time or context, generating an unsettling yet compelling attraction. The era immediately before one’s birth is fertile ground for the uncanny because it is inherently connected to one’s existence, yet it remains elusive and out of reach, shrouded in the fog of collective cultural memory rather than personal experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is where my interest in Land Art, which thrived in the late 1960s and early 1980s comes from. It’s a mythic and heroic past, right outside the scope of my lived awareness. Land Art, moveover, is at a particular inflection in the Greenbergian history of modern art and one that brings us closer to our topic at hand. Art critic Clement Greenberg famously sought to distill the essence and trajectory of art through the modernist progression of self-criticism towards purity and autonomy, particularly in painting. Greenberg posited that art should focus on the specificity of the medium, leading to an emphasis on formal qualities over content or context. Specifically, Greenberg argued that modernist painters should embrace and explore the flatness of the canvas rather than attempt to deny it through illusionistic techniques that create a sense of three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional surface. He saw abstract expressionism and color field painting as driven by the gradual shedding of extraneous elements (like figurative representation, narrative, and illusionistic depth) that were not essential to painting as a medium. This process of reduction aimed at focusing on what was uniquely intrinsic to painting\u2014its flat surface and the potential for pure color and form. This approach is distinctly indebted to Hegelian aesthetics, in which art is seen as a vehicle for the spirit (Geist<\/em>) to realize itself, moving towards a form of absolute knowing or self-consciousness. The late 1960s projects of Minimal Art, Land Art, and Conceptual Art can all be seen as elaborations of Greenbergian modernism. Minimal Art, with its emphasis on the physical object and the space it occupies, pushes Greenberg’s interest in medium specificity to its logical extreme by reducing art to its most fundamental geometric forms and materials, thereby focusing on the “objecthood” of the artwork itself. Land Art extends this exploration to the medium of the earth itself, engaging directly with the landscape to highlight the intrinsic qualities of the environment and the artwork’s integration with its site-specific context, thus reflecting Greenberg’s emphasis on the inherent characteristics of the artistic medium. Conceptual Art, although seemingly divergent in its prioritization of idea over form, aligns with Greenbergian modernism by stripping art down to its conceptual essence, thereby challenging the traditional boundaries of the art object and emphasizing the primacy of the idea, akin to Greenberg’s focus on the essential qualities of painting and bringing art back to relevance as a philosophical discourse. Together, these movements expand upon Greenberg’s foundational principles by exploring the boundaries of what art can be, each pushing the dialogue about medium specificity and the pursuit of purity in art further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coming out of architecture and history, I find art without rigor frustrating and boring, so the art of the late 1960s and early 1970s is my north star and I am indeed something of a neo-Greenbergian (more on that here<\/a>). But during the 1970s, the Greenbergian trajectory encountered significant challenges, marking a pivot away from these ideals towards a more fragmented, pluralistic understanding of art. Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” serves as a critical juncture in this shift. Krauss dismantles the Greenbergian barrier between sculpture and not-sculpture by introducing a set of oppositions that allowed for a broader, more inclusive understanding of sculpture. This “expanded field” theory challenged the purity of medium specificity by embracing a wider range of practices and materials, effectively undermining the modernist notion of progressive refinement and autonomy of the arts. Krauss: <\/p>\n\n\n\n From the structure laid out above, it is obvious that the logic of the space of postmodernist practice is no longer organized around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or, for that matter, the perception of material. It is organized instead through the universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Krauss’s essay, well-intentioned though it was, did not offer a positive direction for research in art, encouraging the sort of lazy pluralism and market-oriented art that has defined far too much art production in the years since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The one exception to all this, however, is photography. If, in my essay on the aesthetics of AI images<\/a>, I lamented the obsession with technical proficiency at the cost of taste in amateur HDR photography, in the hands of the best photographers \u2014from the New Topographics<\/a> movement in the 1970s to the work of great living photographers today, like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Guy Dickinson, David Maisel<\/a> and Richard Barnes\u2014the technical nature of photography is used to explore the photograph as a medium. And photography, by its very nature as an index of reality, its inexorable relationship between the subject and its representation\u2014aligns with the Greenbergian ideal of art that is true to its medium more effectively than other media.<\/p>\nRosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October, Vol. 8 (Spring 1979), 43.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n