Art histories from nowhere: on the coloniality of experiments in art and artificial intelligence

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

AI & SOCIETY (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

This paper considers recent experiments in art and artificial intelligence that crystallize around training algorithms to generate artworks based on datasets derived from the Western art historical canon. Over the last decade, a shift towards the rejection of canonicity has begun to take shape in art historical discourse. At the same time, algorithmically enabled practices in the US and Europe have emerged that entrench the Western canon as a locus and guarantor of aesthetic value. Operating within the epistemic framework of a "view from nowhere," this tendency in generative art inherits the coloniality of both art history and artificial intelligence. Producing "art histories from nowhere," this tendency conflates the conceptual category of visual art with the histories of Western cultural production. It reproduces a set of aesthetic values that entrench the mythology of the artist-genius and his imputed whiteness and masculinity; the extolment of innovation and novelty as self-evident virtues; disembodied Cartesian models of knowing and sensing; and the erasure of contributions that have been occluded from canonical visibility. As we encounter systems trained on particular visions of art history and of the artist, how might we remain attentive to the specific lens through which they are taught to see? This essay addresses that question by bringing the coloniality of recent experiments into view, bridging data feminisms and decolonial studies to formulate alternative visions of encounters between art and AI.

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Notes

1.
Dr. Ahmed Elgammal, "A Note from Dr. Ahmed Elgammal," https://aican.io/story.
2.
Elgammal, "A Note from Dr. Ahmed Elgammal."
3.
http://www.AICAN.io.
4.
Elgammal, "A Note from Dr. Ahmed Elgammal.".
5.
The question of authorial subjectivity in the case of AICAN is complicated by the fact that Ahmed Elgammal is intermittently listed as AICAN’s collaborator in specific contexts, as in the HG Contemporary show discussed later in this paper. However, Elgammal and Marian Mazzone explicitly address the question of authorship in their joint paper from 2019, writing, "We heard one question time and again: Who is the artist? Here, we posit that the person(s) setting up the process designs a conceptual and algorithmic framework, but the algorithm is fully at the creative helm when it comes to the elements and the principles of the art it creates. For each image it generates, the machine chooses the style, the subject, the forms, and composition, including the textures and colors." See Mazzone and Elgammal, "Art, Creativity, and the Potential of Artificial Intelligence," 26.
6.
For an overview of recent texts on AI and creativity, see Mike Pepi, "How Does a Human Critique Art Made by AI?," Art in America, May 6, 2020, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/creative-ai-art-criticism-1202686003/.
7.
In one Art Newspaper item, for example, AICAN’s work is characterized as an "arty technological innovation" poised at "the forefront of the AI revolution." "AICAN the AI Artist: Putting the Art in to Artificial Intelligence," The Art Newspaper, December 25, 2018, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2018/12/25/aican-the-ai-artist-putting-the-art-in-to-artificial-intelligence.
8.
See also "Accomplishments," https://aican.io/accomplishments.
9.
The majority of proceeds reportedly "went to fund research at Rutgers and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France." See Elgammal, "75% of people think this AI artist is human," 2018.
10.
"Faceless Portraits Transcending Time," HG Contemporary, http://www.hgcontemporary.com/exhibitions/faceless-portraits-transcending-time?view=slider#6.
11.
"Is Artificial Intelligence Set to Become Art’s Next Medium?" Christie’s, December 12, 2018, https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-one-a-machine-9332–1.aspx.
12.
Richard Lloyd quoted in "Is Artificial Intelligence Set to Become Art’s Next Medium?".
13.
For an extensive account of the whiteness of AI, see Katz, Artificial Whiteness.
14.
Bas Korsten quoted in "A 'New' Rembrandt: From The Frontiers Of AI And Not The Artist's Atelier," NPR, April 6, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/04/06/473265273/a-new-rembrandt-from-the-frontiers-of-ai-and-not-the-artists-atelier.
15.
Doherty S J (2019) Art in the age of artificial intelligence. Esse. https://esse.ca/en/lart-a-lere-de-lintelligence-artificielle.
16.
A 2019 article notes AICAN’s eight-person team at the time comprised four men and five women. See Rainbow, "Considering Gender in the Age of AICAN, the Unhuman Artist.".
17.
The official AICAN website reads, "With a distinctive AI perspective and a fervent expertise in art history, AICAN is redefining the foundation of our fine art canon." "Meet AICAN," http:// www.AICAN.io.
18.
"The Library of Missing Datasets (2016)," Mimionuoha.com, https://mimionuoha.com/the-library-of-missing-datasets.
19.
According to wikiart.org, the artworks in its datasets are "in museums, universities, town halls, and other civic buildings of more than 100 countries." "About," WikiArt.org, https://www.wikiart.org/en/about.
20.
https://www.artrendex.com.
21.
Importantly, Lugones outlines both a "light side" and a "dark side" of the colonial/modern gender system, with the former associating sexual dimorphism with "white bourgeois males and females," while the "dark side" crystallized around anxieties about forms of embodiment "in many tribal societies prior to colonization without assimilation to the sexual binary." Lugones, "The Coloniality of Gender," 377. Lugones M (2010) The coloniality of gender. In Mignolo W D, Escobar A (eds) Globalization and the decolonial option. Routledge, London, pp 369–390.
22.
Paula Gunn Allen quoted in Lugones, "The Coloniality of Gender," 380. See Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop. Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).
23.
See, for example, Hakim Bishara, "Artist Coalition Announces 10-week ‘Strike’ Against MoMA," Hyperallergic, March 23, 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/631041/artist-coalition-announces-10-week- strike-against-moma/; and Decolonize This Place et al., "Open Letter to the Brooklyn Museum: Your Curatorial Crisis is an Opportunity to Decolonize," April 3, 2018, https://decolonizebrooklynmuseum.wordpress.com/.
24.
"What Is Decolonization?," Abbe Museum, https://abbemuseum.wordpress.com/about-us/decolonization/.

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ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA, USA
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

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Hakopian, M.F. Art histories from nowhere: on the coloniality of experiments in art and artificial intelligence. AI & Soc (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01768-0

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Accepted16 August 2023
Published16 September 2023
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01768-0

Keywords

Artificial intelligence
Art history
Coloniality
Decolonial aesthetics
Algorithmic art
Data feminism

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