Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Intelligence people have liked him. His experience and knowledge of rule-based
systems must be among the most advanced in the world. But he was brave enough
to see that in art history he had reached a dead-end. Observers have speculated
about when would AARON not only be Cohen's favourite artist, but also its own
and best critic. Art cannot be art without critique. As exciting as AARON's works
may be, they were slowly losing their aesthetic appeal, and were approaching the
only evaluation: oh, would you believe, this was done by computer? The dead-end.
Harold Cohen himself sees the situation with a bit more skepticism. He writes:
It would be nice if AARON could tell me which of them [its products] it thinks I should
print, but it can't. It would be nice if it could figure out the implications of what it does so
well and so reliably, and move on to new definitions, new art. But it can't. Do those things
indicate that AARON has reached an absolute limit on what computers can do? I doubt it.
They are things on my
can't-do-that
list...(Cohen
2007
).
The
can't-do-that
list contains statements about what the computer can and what
it cannot do. During his life, Cohen has experienced how items had to be removed
from the list. Every activity that is computable must be taken from the list. There are
activities that are not computable. However, the statement that something cannot be
done by computer, i.e. is not computable, urges creative people to change the non-
computable activity into a computable one. Whenever this is achieved after great
hardship, we don't usually realise that a new activity, a computable one, has been
created with the goal in mind to replace the old and non-computable.
There was a time, when Cohen was said to be on his way to becoming the first
artist of whom there would still be new works in shows after his death. He himself
had said so, jokingly with a glass of cognac in hand. He had gone so far that such
a thought was no longer fascinating. The Cohen manifesto of algorithmic art has
reached its prediction.
But think about the controversial prediction once more. If true, would it not be
proof of the computer's independent creativity? Clearly, Cohen wrote AARON, the
program, the text, the machine, the text-become-machine. This was
his
, Cohen's
creative work. But AARON was independent enough to then get rid of Cohen, and
create art all by itself. How about this?
In a trivial sense, AARON is creative, but this creativity is a pseudo-creativity. It
is confined to the rules and their certainly wide spectrum of possibilities. AARON
will forever remain a technical system. Even if that system contained some meta-
rules capable of changing other rules, and meta-meta-rules altering the meta-rules
on the lower level, there would always be an explicit end. AARON would not be
capable of leaving its own confines. It cannot cross borders.
Cohen's creativity, in comparison, stands out differently. Humans can always
cross borders. A revolution has happened in the art world when the mathematicians
demonstrated to the artists that the individual work was no longer the centre of
aesthetic interest. This centre had shifted to descriptions of processes. The individual
work had given way to the
class of works
. Infinite sets had become interesting, the
individual work was reduced to a by-product of the class. It has now become an
instance only, an index of the class it belongs to.
