Is there gender equality in the digital art world?

Roxanne Vardi and Pau Waelder

Composite photo of the artists (left to right): Dagmar Schürrer, Snow Yunxue Fu, Marina Zurkow, Claudia Larcher, Alexandra Crouwers, Tamiko Thiel, Claudia Hart, Sasha Stiles, Yuge Zhou, and Chun Hua Catherine Dong.

It is a well-known fact, although not properly acknowledged, that over the course of history women artists have been underrepresented in the art world, and in general have been undervalued and underpaid at auction houses, galleries, and museums. As the art historian Katy Hessel, author of the celebrated book The Story of Art Without Men, points out: “it’s actually down to who has been able to tell the story of art history.” Women artists have been routinely erased from art history, or included in relation to male artists, their talent minimized as they were portrayed merely as lovers or muses. In the art market, women artists have not fared better. Traditionally, art galleries have represented far more white men than any other group combined, and as recent reports indicate, the situation hasn’t improved: the Burns-Halperin Report on equity and representation in US museums and the art market, presented in December 2022, indicates that auction sales of works by women artists represent only 3,3% of total sales worldwide, and that only 11% of acquisitions and 14,9% of exhibitions in US museums feature artworks created by women.

The introduction of the digital arts and the emergence of the new media art scene have given women artists the opportunity to become early adopters both of photography and of alternate digital technologies such as VR as these novel mediums also allowed for political and artistic provocation of the accepted norms. Today in general there is also greater awareness towards this unequal tendency, and so different organizations focus on balancing out the different groups of artists which they represent. At Niio we have made it our mission to focus on presenting and promoting the works of women artists whether through the content distributed on our apps or in our editorial section. In 2022, the gender balance of our artist solo shows amounted to a total of close to 60% by women artists. This month, we are honored to showcase the artworks and art practices created by the women artists, and to present this brief survey among ten outstanding artists who have generously answered our questions.

Would you say that the digital art community behaves differently than the contemporary art world in terms of gender balance and visibility of women artists?

Alexandra Crouwers: not really – although my personal field of view in the ‘digital space’ is taken up by a generally much, much more diverse constellation of artists than the ‘traditional’ contemporary art scene I’m embedded in. Likely, the global accessibility and distribution of digital art plays a role. I do suspect museums and other art institutions working with digital media are, perhaps because of the reason above, a bit more aware of adding more women artists in exhibitions compared to the ‘traditional’ art world.

Alexandra Crouwers is an artistic researcher working in the digital realm, and oscillating between escapism and activism.

Claudia Larcher: I don’t have numbers for that, but no, I think that the visibility of women in the art world in general is still unbalanced, be it in the art world or digital art. More attention is now being paid to the issue, but the big solo shows are almost always given to the men.

Claudia Hart: Yes, although strides have been made, I would have to say that the contemporary art world is still way out ahead of the digital space. The engine running digital is innovation culture. I would even go so far as to say that digital art culture functions more as beta testers for new products.  It’s a culture of next new things, so it suffers from extreme ageism. The lowest ranked players in the digital art world are older women – not news not now, not glamorous.  It’s a cute young world.   

“The lowest ranked players in the digital art world are older women. It’s a cute young world.”

Claudia Hart

Dagmar Schürrer: Talking from my own perspective I feel that female identifying artists are quite present in the digital art community. I am based in Berlin, and I am very lucky to be surrounded by a network of strong women creating and researching in the digital art scene. Digital and new media is still kind of uncoupled from the classical art market and rather conceptually driven. It often tackles issues that are closely linked to female politics – like embodiment, social hierarchies, identity, or bias of new technologies. For example, the scene working with XR technologies is very experimental and constantly developing, and is open for fresh and unusual perspectives, which might be resonating with a female experience of a changing society. Nevertheless, it is a sad fact that women in the cultural sector are still outrageously underpaid. Statistics of the German Künstlersozialkasse (artists’ social security fund) show that in 2022 female artists earned an average of 24% less than their male colleagues, the Gender Pay Gap is therefore significantly above the German national average! 

“I feel that female identifying artists are quite present in the digital art community. Nevertheless, it is a sad fact that women in the cultural sector are still outrageously underpaid.”

Dagmar Schürrer

Tamiko Thiel: Until recently, fame in the media art world was driven more by academic voices and the few institutions that showed media art, because the art market was not interested in media art at all. This was primarily Ars Electronica due to its prestigious Golden Nica award, the ZKM because it was the primary institution with an archive and collection of media art, the festivals Transmediale and ISEA and the art gallery at SIGGRAPH.

It was always my impression that these media art institutions however tended to focus very heavily on hardware technology, “boy toys” and a very male view of what is interesting in media art, rather than taking a wider view of the value of media art. I personally was told in a private conversation by a (male) member of the Ars jury, perhaps a decade after I had submitted my VR projection installation Beyond Manzanar (2000, with Zara Houshmand) to the Interactive Art category at Ars, that the others on the jury insisted it was not innovative because it only used a simple joystick as an input device. That is to say they focused exclusively on the hardware, without considering the complex interactive narrative of 13 scenes interweaving the historical Japanese American incarceration in WW2 and similar threats to intern Iranian Americans during the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979-1980, and how we had constructed an interactive structure in which the user’s agency led them to be complicit in their own incarceration.

Tamiko Thiel is a pioneering visual artist exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity in works encompassing interactive 3d virtual worlds (VR), augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence art.

In 2016 Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Addie Wagenknecht started the “Kiss My Ars” hashtag after noticing that in the 37 year history of Ars Electronica, 9 out of 10 Golden Nicas had been awarded to men, putting a hard number on my more vague impression of an unconscious gender bias in values.

In 2012 the new director of the Transmediale, Kristoffer Gansing, shut me down when I responded to panelist Kathy Rae Huffman’s invitation to talk about my AR artwork during what was billed as “open conversation about video art and net culture, media collectives and counter-publics”. (See this webpage for a detailed description and audio recording). This was all the more odd because the festival’s theme “in/compatible” explicitly celebrated 25 years of art interventions and proclaimed in Gansing’s curatorial statement that: “Contrary to the fear of the incompatible, so prevalent in the age of cloud-computing, the festival raises the question of what happens when incompatibility is brought to the fore rather than hidden away in the dark underbelly of digital culture?” Kathy Rae and I of course asked ourselves, if a male curator on the panel had called on a male artist to describe their work, would Gansing have shut them down, as he did to us? It was painful for us as well that no one in the audience, not even the several famous feminist artists present, said anything at all during these encounters. Gansing had just taken over Berlin’s most prestigious media art venue, and I assume no one wanted to get on his bad side.

“In 2021 the art market became aware of digital art for the first time when Beeple sold a NFT for the equivalent of $69 million. The fact that this was roughly 35x the price of the highest selling work by a female artist, ixshells, speaks for itself.”

Tamiko Thiel

Chun Hua Catherine Dong: I think the digital art community and the contemporary art world are very similar in terms of gender balance. Gender imbalance exists within the digital art community, especially in technical and coding writing. Women also are underrepresented in the field of game development and software engineering.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong‘s artistic practice is based in performance art, photography, video, VR, AR, and 3D printing within the contemporary context of global feminism.

Do you work with code-based art? If so, do you write the code, or work with collaborators? What is your experience with the community of coders and engineers?

Sasha Stiles: I’m a lifelong poet who’s always been very interested in science and technology. Though I don’t have a computer science or coding background, I’ve been writing with AI-powered large language models since 2018, and have learned basic coding to fine-tune text generators and experiment with generative visual poetics. I’ve also had a hands-on role for many years now as poetry mentor to the AI android BINA48, built by Hanson Robotics and the Terasem Foundation. I’ve frequently been in the minority at meetings and conferences, but I’ve also found a lot of support for my work in places where I didn’t expect to.

Alexandra Crouwers: I AM A SUPERUSER! We’re being overlooked, but that’s another story: there’s such a focus on code and generative abstraction at the moment, people forget most of us use those techniques too, but then as part of more encompassing works (this does not answer your question at all, haha).

Marina Zurkow: I work with coders, usually as an equal collaboration (not with teams). In my intimate work world, at present, I have an even split between male and female identified technologist collaborators.

Sasha Stiles a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist and AI researcher widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and language art.

Claudia Larcher: I have limited skills in coding but try to do everything by myself, as I had some bad experiences with male coders. Which was also a kind of empowerment. Actually I don’t know any female identifying coders, which is a pity. The coding community as I know it, is a male-only community. Hopefully it will change in the near future.

“The coding community as I know it, is a male-only community. Hopefully it will change in the near future.”

Claudia Larcher

Claudia Hart: I’ve just produced my first Art Blocks. I was part of a group of women invited to develop a project.  I went to a meeting for the newbies, and I was the only woman present,  The rest were guy coders. I’ve also collaborated with my friend Andrew Blanton, a cute young coder, because I can’t do it for myself. Not sure I would ever do this again. 

Claudia Larcher’s work explores video animation, collage, photography and installation with a cinematic approach to storytelling, extracting narratives from nondescript, everyday spaces.

Dagmar Schürrer: I am working with XR technologies in my own artistic practice as well as a project assistant at the research group INKA at the HTW Berlin – University of Applied Sciences. INKA is an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists and cultural workers like me, producing and teaching XR projects in the cultural field at the Institute for Culture and Computer Science. In the group there are slightly more female developers, but I would say that is rather unusual and a conscious decision to support women in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), which is of course great! This is not reflected in most of those degree programs, where women are significantly underrepresented, so there is still a lot to do to make these fields more attractive for women. This is also similar in the freelance sector; I have the impression that here female developers are very rare.

“My VRML artworks are all code based, and I wrote all the code myself. I have had a lot of support and no problems from the community of coders and engineers.”

Tamiko Thiel

Tamiko Thiel: My VRML artworks (Beyond Manzanar, The Travels of Mariko Horo, Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall) are all code based, and I wrote all the code myself. I have had a lot of support and no problems from the community of coders and engineers in terms of gender inequalities. Since 2018 my husband, the software developer Peter Graf, collaborates with me on some but not all artworks. Since he is a professional coder, he can code much faster than I!

In your experience, has the NFT market benefited gender equality in any way? Do women artists get better chances at selling their work?

Alexandra Crouwers: Not sure yet. Although in the very conservative contemporary art context I’m geographically in, I’d say I had at least a couple of disadvantages: being a women artist and working with digital media. It often felt the combination was just too much for people to handle. For me, the NFT space has connected my practice to a whole network of nodes of amazing fellow women artists, with similar experiences. On the other hand: I’ve never sold so much work in my artist life before, so purely based on that I’d say ‘yes’.

“The NFT space has connected my practice to a whole network of nodes of amazing fellow women artists, with similar experiences.”

Alexandra Crouwers

Snow Yunxue Fu works with imaging technologies, such as 3D Simulation, AR, XR, and the Metaverse in interdisciplinary explorations into the universal aesthetic and definitive nature of the techno sublime.

Snow Yunxue Fu: I do think the NFT market has opened more opportunities for women artists and all artists in general, especially at the earlier stage of its developments and expansion. However, as the NFT market has a tendency to follow the historical art market, there are still many inequalities. It is quite important to have awareness for all parties involved and make efforts to give more support to women artists.

Marina Zurkow: Among niche digital art worlds, perhaps – but not at the high-price & high-profile level. Those “spots” are consistently and disproportionately going to men.

Claudia Larcher: I read that female artists are doing better in the NFT world than in the global art world but parity is still far away. I think that people see an investment when buying NFTs, and male artists still achieve higher re-sales. 

Tamiko Thiel: The NFT market has a specific aesthetic that sells well, and I consider that aesthetic to be a very male gaze shaped by fantasy/science fiction/video games. Perhaps women artists who hide their gender do better, but as a woman artist who uses her real name, I think it helps me for intermediaries to call attention to my work and to tell potential collectors that my work is valuable. THANK YOU FOR HELPING! 🙂

Chun Hua Catherine Dong: This is a good question. I don’t get involved much at the NFT at this moment so I cannot tell whether the NFT market benefits more women artists. But the NFT market definitely is easier to enter while the traditional market requires years to build up one’s reputation.

What is your opinion about female-led NFT projects? Can you mention some projects that you find interesting?

Sasha Stiles: I’m proud to be part of theVERSEverse, a women-led poetry gallery that seeks to empower writers by bringing poets into the art world. Co-founded by Kalen Iwamoto, Ana Maria Caballero and myself, with advisor Gisel Florez and community manager Elisabeth Sweet, theVERSEverse is trying to do something that has never really existed elsewhere, on or offline. I’m constantly astounded by the vision and tireless work ethic of women in web3 and adjacent spaces: Sofia Garcia, Jess Conaster, Micol Ap of Vertical Crypto Art, Danielle King, Diane Drubay, Valerie Whitacre, Ariel Hudes, Raina Mehler, Nicole Sales Giles, Lydia Chen, Mika Bar-On Nesher, Elena Zavalev, Eleanora Brizi, Fanny Lakoubay, to name just a few. I love the FEMGEN initiative from VCA and Right Click Save, and the Unsigned project by Operator and Anika Meier, and I’m represented by such women-owned galleries as Annka Kultys Gallery in London and Galerie Brigitte Schenk in Cologne.

Marina Zurkow is a media artist focused on near-impossible nature and fostering intimate connections between humans, other species, and planetary agents.

Marina Zurkow: Christiane Paul’s curated exhibition Chain Reaction on Feral File is a good example of highly rigorous, thoughtful NFT projects that are female-led or in collaboration. I think very highly of the works of Stephanie Dinkins, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Sara Ludy, and the McCoys because their work has not only deep logic but they are concerned with what the blockchain can DO; it’s not just another white wall in a white cube gallery.

Claudia Larcher: I appreciate the work of the Austrian artist LIA, who is a pioneer of software and net art. I think that with producing NFTs she was really compensated for her artistic work in an appropriate monetary way.

Dagmar Schürrer: I want to mention the project Unsigned by Operator and Anika Meier. It is a collection of 100 signatures from women and non-binary artists to highlight the fact that a female signature on an artwork can devalue it. Turning the signatures themselves into artworks is a very clever and strong gesture, and I love the focused and minimal realization, both conceptually and aesthetically. It is positively simple, to the point and potentially iconic.

Tamiko Thiel: I find Auriea Harvey‘s and Nettrice Gaskin‘s work simply stunning, beautiful and meaningful. They create beautiful works of art like nothing I have ever seen before, and bring together incredible depths of art history and cultural history together from a very different viewpoint as the previous several thousands of years of art. All hail! I am delighted that ixshells‘ work is valued so highly, but such purely geometric abstractions are personally not so interesting for me.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong:  I appreciate projects that are not made specifically for any kind of markets, but rather for the artists themselves or for the sake of art itself. Maybe these kinds of projects will have the potential to go both into the traditional and the NFT markets eventually, but the idea of “art made for sale” doesn’t sound right for me. Artists such as Claudia Hart, Carla Gannis, and Frank Wang Yefeng are very interesting.

In the 1980’s the feminist art movement began working mainly with photography and the newly available technological tools of the time. Do you feel that with the introduction of video art this even more so allowed artists to question older social models?

Sasha Stiles: Both my practice and personal life are implicitly feminist in that I embody taboo concepts of womanhood, from engaging in male-dominated fields to eschewing many of the social and domestic expectations that are prescribed to women. So when a large language model fine-tuned on my own work, developed to write like me, expresses misogyny and disturbing stereotypes, for example, it’s powerful. Creative AI as a new medium demands that we go beyond questioning older social systems to infiltrating them, building ourselves into them.

Claudia Hart has worked since the 1990s examining issues of identity and representation with 3D animation.

Alexandra Crouwers: Yes, Pipilotti Rist for me was the one who opened artistic doors by unapologetically using the idea of music videos as an art form, and showing how projections including audio can transform a whole space. This, again, is a very personal example, of course, but, to me, Rist provided a role model in an art education that for 95% was taken up by men.

Marina Zurkow: The number of brilliant, inspiring feminist video artists is staggering. Please don’t forget pioneers Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, Howardena Pindell, Shigeko Kubota, and the following waves of the likes of Laura Parnes, Elisabeth Subrin, Mika Rottenberg, tackling very different aspects of life through a feminist lens.

“Creative AI as a new medium demands that we go beyond questioning older social systems to infiltrating them, building ourselves into them.”

Sasha Stiles

Claudia Larcher: I believe that video as a medium was new at that time and not yet occupied by men, like painting or sculpture. There was this window of opportunity for many female artists.

Claudia Hart: I am not sure, there have always been women painters, but they were written out of history. I’ve been working with 3d animation and VR since ‘96.  I developed a program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago called Experimental 3D, and my young women students have been institutionalized and awarded. I actually have never had an institutional exhibit, neither group or solo, nor have gotten grants or any kind of award of status. So case in point.

Dagmar Schürrer assembles found footage, digitally generated objects and animations, text, drawing and sound to form intricate video-sound-montages, often extended by Augmented Reality, evocative of painting, collage or poetry.

Dagmar Schürrer: I have the feeling there is a tendency, when new tools or technologies become available, that female and non-binary artists are fast to integrate those in their own artistic practice, before the methodologies enter the mainstream. It may offer a certain freedom and field of experimentation, without the pressure of capitalist art markets, and therefore a progressive opportunity to negotiate and reflect the topics of underrepresented groups.

“I believe that video as a medium was new at that time and not yet occupied by men, like painting or sculpture. There was this window of opportunity for many female artists.”

Claudia Larcher

Tamiko Thiel: Yes, at the beginning of a new medium there is much more room for experimentation, when the market is not established yet and therefore artists can experiment without the pressure to think about the sales value of the work. Initially there is the problem of access to technology – during which women also usually have more difficulty. Then there is a short interval in which anyone can access the technology because it has become commercial enough to be widely available. This is the time in which most innovation occurs. Then when the art market picks up a medium, its values impact directly on the work that is made, as artists try to live from their work.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong: Using new media or incorporating technology in artwork has definitely changed the ways of how to make art. Video art offered artists the ability to create time-based works that could incorporate performance and documentation. The introduction of video art has provided a powerful tool for feminist artists to express their ideas related to gender and identity, and to create works that reflect their own experiences and perspectives.

“There is a female sensibility behind the lens. Even in subtle ways, this changes what the viewers see.”

Yuge Zhou

Yuge Zhou is a Chinese born, Chicago-based artist whose videos and installations address rootedness, isolation and longing within sites of shared dreams.


Yuge Zhou: Video art introduces the time element into social critique. In some way, video art has a huge landscape to mine and to reference with cinema and television and the internet videoscape. With a growing number of women behind the camera and in charge of the means of productions – what they shoot, how they shoot are opening up. There is a female sensibility behind the lens. Even in subtle ways, this changes what the viewers see. Nowadays, both men and women are going into the technological fields like editing and cinematography, and a lot of tools and venues are available to both make and show video art. But there’s still a long way to go in terms of equity both behind and in front of the camera.

Fabula, tales of possible futures by Diane Drubay

Pau Waelder

In her latest series Fabula. Micro Stories from Tomorrow’s World, artist Diane Drubay continues her exploration of a narrative that raises awareness about the effects of climate change, while keeping with the clean, balanced visual composition that has become a defining element of her work. Consisting of six 1-minute videos (at the time of this writing) distributed as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain, Fabula plays with our imagination by suggesting possible futures in which the environment would be radically altered due to the effects of human activity on the planet, particularly the violent and massive pollution produced by a handful of powerful companies. 

Diane Drubay, Fabula 4 – Micro Stories From Tomorrow’s World, 2023

Each story starts with a question that the artist aptly depicts as a query in a search engine, evoking how nowadays we seek immediate answers online, when we fail to understand what is happening around us. The imagined future appears in a circle at the center of the image, initially as an anomaly, its hues sharply contrasting the real image of the sky, a desert, a lake, or the sea. Slowly, the whole image changes its color to match the tones inside the circle, which finally blends into it and disappears. The circle becomes a metaphor for the possible futures described by scientific research: while they might seem outlandish at first, they can become real, at a slow but relentless pace that makes denial so much easier. 

A selection of works from Fabula is now available as an artcast on Niio. On the occasion of its launch, I asked Diane three questions about her current practice and the NFT scene, as a follow-up on a previous interview published in Niio Editorial.

Explore a selection of works from Fabula on Niio

Diane Drubay, Fabula 6 – Micro Stories From Tomorrow’s World, 2023

After the protests in different art museums, it seems that climate change has been out of the news cycle. How do you see creating art about climate change in the current situation?

Changing the discourse and actions around climate change and the future of our planet must be done in depth. The change must be individual as well as systemic. Of course, news has its cycles, but climate change is always a hot topic. Activist groups or unions of museum professionals have been active for years, and will be for some time to come (unfortunately) considering the current state of our societies. I particularly remember 2018 / 2019 when the COP21 had raised the crowds and inspired the creation of activist communities that demand climate action. 

Just as these activists continue to gather and denounce unsustainable behaviors, the creation of art with an activist vocation for the environment must continue. It is by maintaining the same clear, coherent and strong message for years, that it can begin to be heard, understood and shared. My art calls for slowness, but above all, for sustainability. The notion of time and cycles always comes back in my works in order to position them within an infinite space of time that can easily be assimilated to that of nature. 

Just as environmental activists continue to gather and denounce unsustainable behaviors, the creation of art with an activist vocation for the environment must continue.

How was your experience at the recent NFT Paris event? How do you see the NFT scene evolving at present?

I traveled to NFT Paris to meet my friends, those people I have evolved with, and I felt shaken and fulfilled since March 2021. Artists, collectors, developers, curators, galleries, and many others have come together (almost) exactly two years after the birth of our beloved community around hic et nunc. What is enchanting about this group is their desire to focus on what makes sense, their desire to do things together and to make things happen, in a global and collective way. 

This aside, NFT Paris has become a major event of the NFT scene with 18K visitors in two days in the most iconic venue in Paris: Le Grand Palais Éphémère. In the aisles, one could feel the growing entrepreneurship of this new generation of founders and creatives.

“In the NFT scene, I see a lot of respect and exchange, knowledge being shared and collaborations being born.” 

To be honest, I’m in a bubble within this community of Tezos artists and it’s very difficult to have an objective look at the rest of the NFT scene. On our side, we see players consolidating, new platforms, curators, and galleries trying out new things while trying to understand and respect the culture already established. I see a lot of respect and exchange, knowledge being shared and collaborations being born. 

Diane Drubay, Fabula 6 – Micro Stories From Tomorrow’s World, 2023

You are donating the sales of one of the artworks from Fabula to support the victims of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria in February 2023. The NFT scene has been quite active in supporting humanitarian and environmental causes, do you think this will be a permanent aspect of this sector of the digital art market?

The act of creating and donating art for social and environmental charities is part of the DNA of the creative community using the Tezos blockchain. It started early on, back in March 2021, when DiverseNFT launched the OBJKT4OBJKT weekend to call for more diversity within the NFT art market. Then, this habit took hold and it became part of the culture: call for community support via NFT art donations and support the NGOs who need it most. 

In February 2023, the Tezos art community joined forces to support the victims of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria under the initiative #TezQuakeAid. Since then, more than 110K xtz (around $109,000) have been raised through the donation of +720 artworks. 

“The Tezos art community has raised around $109,000 to support the victims of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria under the initiative #TezQuakeAid.”

Find out more about Diane Drubay’s work in a longer interview published in 2022.

Claudia Hart on Machiavelli, politics, and NFTs

New York-based artist Claudia Hart’s background in art and architectural history and publishing has defined an artistic practice developed since the late 1980s and focused on bridging the physical and digital worlds. An art critic and curator as well as an artist, her production is infused with literary and art historical references, using the words of male philosophers, poets, and painters such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ford, or Walter Gropius to apply a feminist approach to the representation of women in art and the influence of digital technologies in our patriarchal society.

An early work that she has come back to regularly, A Child’s Machiavelli combines many of Hart’s interests, from literature to analog and digital image making, performance, and a satirical view of society. 

Claudia Hart. LittleGuys, 1994.

A Child’s Machiavelli is a series that started in 1995 and has seen many different versions over a span of almost three decades. Hart was living in Berlin at the time the city was reinventing itself after the fall of the infamous wall. As the artist recalls, despite the spirit of newly regained freedom and the reunification of its people, the emerging art scene was fiercely competitive. She told a friend, sarcastically, that what was needed in that context was a revision of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). The oft-quoted treatise on politics, known for its pragmatism and lack of morality, seemed particularly apt for a young society that was plunging deep and fast into capitalism. Hart’s version of The Prince, however, was not meant to be a guide for ambitious and reckless artists, but rather a fable about a time in which innocence would be lost to self-interest. She chose to create a primer to teach bad manners to children, aiming to spark a reflection on contemporary politics through the obvious contradiction between the childlike illustrations and the shockingly expedient advice.

Claudia Hart. A Child’s Machiavelli. Exhibition at bitforms (New York), 2020.

The initial version of A Child’s Machiavelli counted 31 small oil paintings, each one combining an illustration taken from a classic children’s book and the text that Hart had written, updating Machiavelli’s dictums in a more informal language. The paintings were exhibited in 1995 at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin, accompanied by a small catalog produced by the Realismus Studio. From the beginning, the artist saw her Machiavelli as an imaginary book, with the paintings representing its pages, and quickly the project morphed into different formats, such as the first printed edition (Machiavelli für Kids. Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1995), or the hip-hop track Babyrap (1996), performed by Hart and produced in collaboration with the French band Assassin. The artist then imagined the next iteration of A Child’s Machiavelli as an animated series (intended to be aired in the popular MTV music video channel), which became her first 3D work, setting a turning point in her artistic production.

Hart’s version of The Prince is a fable about a time in which innocence would be lost to self-interest.

The series saw three more printed editions, one in French (Le Petit Machiavel illustré. Paris: Abbeville Press, 1998), and two in English. The first English version was published by Penguin Books in New York in 1998, and a decade later a second edition was published by Beatrice Books in a redesigned version. This latter edition, that came out in 2019, proved how relevant Machiavelli is to this day, and how aptly Hart’s satirical guide for infantile and selfish rulers reflects actual politics: in 2020, the results of  the United States presidential election were contested by Donald J. Trump, who refused to concede defeat and led his supporters to attack the US Capitol. The way in which Trump’s foolhardy self-interest and childish narcissism almost ended democracy seems right out of Machiavelli’s playbook and even more outlandish than Hart’s mordacious fairy tale.

Claudia Hart. A Child’s Machiavelli. New York: Beatrice Books, 2019

In 2021, as the NFT market boomed, Claudia Hart saw in this form of distribution and commercialization of digital art something akin to her experience with publishing books and magazines. The possibility of both widely distributing her artworks while retaining a sense of ownership (as is the case with printed books) appealed to her. So, the next version of A Child’s Machiavelli consists of 20 animated short films distributed as NFTs and presented in an exclusive artcast on Niio. On the occasion of this new phase in the Machiavelli project, I had a long conversation with the artist, in which we focused particularly on the latest iteration of the book as a series of NFTs.

Claudia Hart. DonDontThrowYourMoneyAround, 1994.

Continuing A Child’s Machiavelli as a series of NFTs seems a logical next step in the project, but what has been your experience with the NFT market so far?

When I first entered the NFT market, I was participating in auctions but I pulled out because they were taking what was intended to be a one-of-a-kind painting, a unique artwork, and then turning it into an edition. It seemed to me that this would hurt me. I always had a very ambivalent relationship with digital, but when NFTs came along, I realized that they are a hybrid of publishing, and digital, which is interesting to me. I’ve also had a very good experience with the community, it is very supportive. 

What is happening in the NFT space now that the crash happened, is that NFTs are being developed as a medium, not just as a register on the blockchain. If I take my earlier work, where for instance I do a movie that is 12 to 20 minutes long and it took me a year to make, and then I sell it as an NFT, I am giving the collector a guarantee of provenance and ownership. But the artwork is not “an NFT,” it’s a movie. As a medium, NFTs are serial, not sequential, because you can’t put things in order, like a baseball card is serial, but not sequential.

“NFTs are far from being anti-capitalist, as some people may want to describe them. They are pure neoliberalism.”

Claudia Hart

Since the original drawings are inspired by 1920s children’s books and the text was written in the 1990s, have you considered creating a new version using other references from children’s literature and updating the language to how kids talk today?

The illustrations I use in this series (the potter, the rabbit, Alice, and so forth), are all in the public domain. I have a collection of these illustrations from out-of-print books from the olden days, which I used to create the paintings and drawings for A Child’s Machiavelli. This is relevant in terms of copyright in relation to NFTs, because these are also about rights ownership. I think the issue of ownership, certified on the blockchain, coupled with distribution everywhere, is mainly the radical part of the production. The rights of the artwork usually remain with the artist, but lately several NFT projects have been offering the copyright of the image to the owner of the NFT, so some NFT collectors expect to have full rights over the artwork they bought. 

Claudia Hart. YoureNoGood, 1994.

Therefore, it can be said that NFTs are far from being anti-capitalist, as some people may want to describe them. They are pure neoliberalism. I believe that by selling NFTs I am not helping, but that is also part of why I want to make all my NFTs very dark and perverse, and about power. I have done another series about the Art of War, which has not been released yet. I also have handmade illustrations that I will turn ultimately into animations as well. Those have vocalizations, where I process the sound and I do interesting things with it. 

Claudia Hart. GivingThingsAway, 1994

The NFT market has been quite wild over the last two years, maybe as fiercely competitive as the art scene of the mid-1990s in Berlin. Do you see Machiavellian tactics in it?

The crypto winter cleared the ground of the pure, speculative designer ethos. It cleared the ground for artists, because now that there’s not so much money and attention we can focus on exploring NFTs as an artistic form. Some artists are bringing back generative art in new forms, and then there’s what I said about it being a serial but not sequential type of medium. Also, the NFT marketplaces are now looking for new blood, because those that were there in the first place are a bit contaminated right now. So they need a whole bunch of newbies like me, because they can sell us for cheaper. It’s the same thing in the art world: after a fiscal crash, the speculators like to bring in new “undiscovered artists,” because we’re cheaper.

Explore Claudia Hart’s work on Niio

Disordinary Beauty, a work in progress (part 1)

Domenico Barra and Pau Waelder

DISØRDINARY BƏAUTY is an ongoing art project by Domenico Barra that explores ugliness through glitch art. The project has been developed as a series of NFTs, with a new phase taking place on Niio as a work in progress, in which the artist will periodically upload new artworks and accompanying documentation. Here in the Editorial section, we’ll publish email exchanges bringing light into Domenico’s creative process and the ideas and influences behind this project.

Follow Domenico Barra’s work in progress on your screen in DISØRDINARY BƏAUTY: art canon

Domenico Barra is an Italian artist, educator, and curator whose work delves into the aesthetics of glitch art, “dirty” digital media and Internet cultures. He creates images, gifs, videos, and installations through a variety of techniques aimed at generating errors in the processes carried out by hardware and software to create the contents we experience on screens. In 2017, he adopted the nickname Altered_Data, inspired by the realization that online data is gradually shaping and manipulating our identity and behavior, and the fact that he was born with an immune system disorder.

He is the creator and art director of the online project White Page Gallery/s. a distributed and decentralized art network and community. In 2021, he started minting his works as NFTs and is now an active member of the NFT art community, selling his work on Ethereum and Tezos. He teaches glitch art and dirty new media at RUFA – Rome University of Fine Art. His work has been exhibited, among others, at DAM Gallery (Berlin), Galerie Charlot (Paris), Digital Art Center (Taipei), online at the Wrong Biennale and with Arebyte, and in many other galleries and cultural art events worldwide, on the internet and the metaverse.

Domenico Barra, DB a̶r̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶o̶n̶ | a̶ ̶b̶e̶a̶u̶t̶y̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶v̶i̶o̶l̶e̶t̶, 2023

First ɛʍǟɨʟ exchange

from: Pau Waelder
to: Domenico Barra
date: Feb 19, 2023, 12:23 PM
subject: Re: Disordinary Beauty Work In Progress launch

Hi, Domenico!
I’d like to start publishing our series of exchanges in the Editorial section this week. For the first exchange, I’d like to shoot this question:

I have read several interviews in which you describe how you got into Glitch Art and the artists that inspired you. We’ll get into that later, but I’d like to ask you: what does glitch mean to you now, in the midst of growing AI creativity, after the NFT boom, and in relation to this particular project about beauty?

from: Domenico Barra 
to: Pau Waelder 
date: Feb 20, 2023, 6:47 PM
subject: Re: Disordinary Beauty Work In Progress launch

Hello Pau, 

Ten years ago, I began making glitch art, and since then, glitching has evolved and taken on different meanings that are all related to our imperfect nature. I’m enthusiastic about AI and have been exploring with other glitch artists what a glitch within AI means and how to trigger it. However, since AI networks and ƧYƧƬΣMƧ are vast, closed, and not very transparent, most discussions are about finding vulnerabilities to exploit. A glitch within AI may not look like the digital glitches we’re accustomed to for sure, but Nick Briz advanced the suggestion that a glitch within AI could still be considered as something unexpected. For instance, AI’s inability to accurately depict hands can be considered a glitch.

A glitch within AI may not look like the digital glitches we’re accustomed to. For instance, AI’s inability to accurately depict hands can be considered a glitch.

My personal approach takes inspiration from Databending, precisely incorrect editing. I started inducing short circuits in AI’s word-based processing by using prompts inspired by L33T SP34K language. The results are interesting and absurd images that could resemble some sort of twisted memes. In databending, by injecting random values or deleting/substituting some data values in image files using hex editing, the software organizes the data according to the standard file format. I played with altering prompt word input and influencing AI’s interpretation to create random “glitchy” image associations, resulting in unexpected and interesting outcomes.

NFTs offer an opportunity for experimentation in the imperfect art market, but the vision of doing things differently is gradually fading as they are becoming more “traditional”. Decentralization requires a cultural shift in personal and community values, and Web3 still heavily relies on Web2 social media, hindering social value and the ways value is created and artists promoted and glorified. Glitch art emerged in crypto art thanks in part to X-Copy‘s market success and leadership. There is also a marketplace called Glitch Forge that is entirely dedicated to glitch works of all sorts. Glitch art and styles are popular online and in NFT/crypto art, with artists reclaiming their space through the #postglitch aesthetic, especially in response to the status quo. The most famous probably is “Trash Art”, a movement of artists using glitch apps and filters excessively and with a strong amateur style in response to the anonymous artist PAK who declared that artists using glitch effects for their art were not real artists, leading to the creation of the trash art movement.

Confused? Try this quick intro to Glitch Art:

NFTs offer an opportunity for experimentation in the imperfect art market, but the vision of doing things differently is gradually fading as they are becoming more “traditional”.

Disordinary Beauty was born in the midst of the NFT boom and the emergence of new creative apps. Specifically, there was a growing interest in generative art among NFT collectors. It started as a personal experiment when I decided to try out some new generative glitch scripts. While browsing Instagram, I came across a selfie by one of the many influencers on the platform. As someone who has always struggled with the cult of image, beauty, and success perpetuated by Instagram, I decided to use the glitch scripts to slice up the selfie, surely inspired by The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh that I had just finished reading. I continued this practice by creating one glitch portrait per day, every day, using a different influencer’s selfie each time.

As I continued to select selfies to glitch, I noticed that there were many common features among them such as the lighting, saturation, head position, and gaze. It was as though there was a programmed formula for shooting the perfect selfie. Through further reading, I discovered that the pose and formula adopted by influencers were not just for the sake of appearance, but also to make their photos easily recognizable by Instagram algorithms, thereby gaining more priority in the platform’s feed. This led me to see the glitch scripts as a way to reprogram and decode the selfies, ultimately erasing the image itself. This became a sort of redemption of the atypical, the imperfect, and the weird.

The pose and formula adopted by influencers in their selfies were not just for the sake of appearance, but also to make their photos easily recognizable by Instagram algorithms.

My interest in the concept of beauty on Instagram led me to read ʊʍɮɛʀȶօ Eco‘s On Ugliness and expand my exploration into the meaning of beauty and ugliness in art, and how it has been used to create new biases towards individuals who do not fit societal standards. I wanted to push things a bit further and delve into these concepts in the realm of AI as a sort of social consciousness, prompting image-based conversations with AI using ChatGPT so far and then also disrupting the perception and formatting of beauty in classical art.

Disordinary Beauty is now divided into three stages. The first stage, “BÆUTY IZ CH∆ØZ,” involves glitch erasure actions on influencers’ selfies. The second stage is “Conversation between AI and I” on topics related to beauty, ugliness, art, and society. The third stage called “art canon” will happen on Niio and involves bringing chaos into the harmony and beauty of classical artworks, and the experience of the viewers.”

Sincerely,
d0/\/\!

Antoine Schmitt: coding movement

Pau Waelder

Paris-based artist Antoine Schmitt describes himself as a “heir of kinetic art and cybernetic art,” aptly indicating the two main aspects of his work: the interest in all processes of movement, and the use of computers to create generative and interactive artworks. With a background as a programming engineer in human computer relations and artificial intelligence, his career spans almost three decades and is characterized by a combination of interactive installations, process-based abstract pieces, and performances. He has collaborated with a wide range of professionals from the fields of music, dance, architecture, literature, and cinema. He also performs in live concerts and writes about programmed art.

Schmitt’s award-winning artworks have been exhibited internationally, in prestigious venues such as the Centre Georges Pompidou and Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and world-renown festivals Sonar (Barcelona), and Ars Electronica (Linz). A selection of video recordings from his generative works have been featured in our curated art program, including the artcasts Unvirtual Art Fair (Paris) and Possibles, which was exhibited at the ISEA2022 Barcelona Symposium. The artist kindly answered a series of questions about the concepts and processes behind his work.

Antoine Schmitt and Franck Vigroux. ATOTAL. Audiovisual concert, 2021

From your early works to the latest installations, there is a constant interest in the relationship between the artwork and the viewer, and more generally between a human and a machine, that often become intimate, connected to emotions and to physical proximity. What do you find interesting about this strange relationship between an individual and a machine, or an apparently sentient entity?

Programming has always been for me a means to approach reality, by recreating it. I consider programming as a radically new material, in art and in general, because of its active nature: programs are processes embedded in reality and can react to it and act upon it. This specificity allows me to recreate programmatically aspects of nature that interest me. One of the most complex entities in reality (known so far) is the human being. Many of my artworks stage a programmed artificial entity that embodies a deep aspect of human nature. These artworks act for me as mirrors for the viewer, a way to question deep human mechanisms or ways of being, like desire, curiosity, language, conflict, gravity, etc… not forgetting that humans are also animals, and are also bodies in space. 

This approach also allows me to reflect on the way we humans are programmed, by laws, evolution, society, etc… My artworks are, like deep science fiction, very much fueled by philosophy, physics, metaphysics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc… Using programming to create artificial entities, more or less intelligent, more or less sentient, but all embodying dynamic aspects of human life, allows me to focus each artwork on a specific concept or aspect of human nature. They are forms of living caricatures that are all the more effective.

“I consider programming as a radically new material because of its active nature: programs are processes embedded in reality and can react to it and act upon it.”

Your work is characterized both by its interactivity and the generative processes that bring it to life. What do you find most interesting about these two types of processes, the one carried out by an autopoietic generative artwork and the one carried out by an interactive installation?

All my artworks are active and exist in real time, i.e. the same time as the spectator. Some artworks are not sensitive to the real world, they are not interactive, they live their life in their own universe, and we watch them like we would watch a strange animal in an aquarium. With these artworks, the main link between the audience and the artwork is through empathy. By projecting oneself in the existential universe of the artwork, the spectator recognizes and feels the situation. It is the same process as with movies and books, with the additional dimension of the real time: with realtime artworks the spectator knows, or feels, that what happens happens here and now. It is not a recording. This gives a different dimension to the empathy, like when watching a live performance which also happens here and now.

Antoine Schmitt. Systemic. Interactive installation, 2010

With interactive artworks, I usually want to question the behaviors and inner mechanisms of the audience themselves. It is the actions of the viewer which are the artwork, I create the dynamic situation in which the viewer is immersed and I orient it so as to highlight and question certain deep ways of being. For example, the Systemic (2010), Lignes-mobiles (1999) and La chance (2017) installations draw dynamic arrows on the floor in front of passers-by to question their intention. In Psychic (2007), a text on the wall describes the movements and intentions of the spectators in the exhibition space (“Somebody is coming”).

I tend to adopt a minimalist approach: I don’t use an artistic dimension (color, figure, interactivity) unless it is mandatory for the artwork. So I don’t use interactivity unless the artwork’s subject is the spectator themselves.

“In my interactive installations it is the actions of the viewer which are the artwork, I create the dynamic situation in which the viewer is immersed and I orient it so as to highlight and question certain deep ways of being.”

Since the beginning of your career, you have collaborated with performing artists, among which composers such as Vincent Epplay, Franck Vigroux, and Jean-Jacques Birgé, performers such as Hortense Gauthier, and choreographers such as Jean-Marc Matos and Anne Holst. How did these collaborations take place? What have they brought to your own work and your creative process?

I have two different approaches to performance, whether I’m on stage or not. When I work with professional performers who use their body and actions as their main material, we craft situations where the human entity is confronted to an artificial one. This allows us to precisely stage the encounter and focus precisely on certain aspects, which become the subject of the performance. The situation usually centers on the concept of an encounter with an “other” and on the modalities of dialog. In Myselves with Jean-Marc Matos, it is about exploring various modes of dialog like imitation, fight or fusion. In CliMax with Hortense Gauthier, it is about finding mutual pleasure. In these setups, the mirror effect happens between the performer and the artificial entity rather than with the audience. The audience is watching the encounter. The artificial creature becomes an actor of the performance, in the spirit of performance: taking risks in a staged delicate situation. 

Antoine Schmitt and Hortense Gauthier. CliMax (Préliminaires), 2018

When I am on stage, I usually play live images, using a videogame-like visual instrument that I program myself and that recreates a specific abstract though consistent live universe, while the other performer plays live music. We are in a situation of semi-improvisation and we create an audio-visual temporal exploratory journey around a specific theme (the birth of shapes in Tempest, the cohabitations of multiple timelines in Chronostasis, totalities in ATOTAL, flows in Cascades, etc…). As a performer, I appreciate sharing the energy of the present moment with the audience, especially while being delved into an artificial universe and struggling with it, which the audience can feel.

Antoine Schmitt. Generative Quantum Ballet 21 Video Recording, 2022

Besides the performing arts, another strong reference in your work is scientific research: you often mention theories from mathematics or physics as the conceptual ground for your pieces. What does science bring to your work? How do you build a bridge between the scientific method and your creative process?

I am very sensitive to the deep and strong laws of the universe that math and physic theories can give us, as they allow me to both approach our reality and imagine other possible realities. What is interesting with these laws is that they are programmable so I can recreate them using programs, thus focusing on deep mechanisms, to stage them or alter them. For example, in the Tempest show, I created a universe containing many of the forces of our universe but also invented forces, thus opening the doors to parallel universes.

I often say that science and art are interested in the same subject : the crack that exists between reality and our abstraction of it. This crack is our curse as human beings. Animals do not feel this pain but as soon as one has the gift of abstraction, the distance between what we abstract and what is, is the source of all mental suffering. Science tries to close that crack by explaining as much as possible through theories and language, more and more precisely, even though it is an impossible task (as was demonstrated in the 20th century by the scientists Heisenberg and Gödel). On the contrary, Art delves in the depths of the crack, exploring all its modalities, playing with all the emotions that stem from it. And the narrower the crack, the deeper it is.

“I often say that science and art are interested in the same subject: the crack that exists between reality and our abstraction of it.”

The aspects of your work that we have previously addressed all point to a main subject which are the processes of movement, as clearly highlighted in your artist’s statement. These processes are explored in a wide range of contexts, from the quantum realm to urban societies, and among different actors, be it people, bodies, or particles. Why are these processes so important to your work, and which of these contexts is more rich, engaging or interesting to you?

I think that I’ve always had this abstract approach to reality which can be synthesized in the question “why does it move like this?”. I started with a rather scientific approach through my studies as an engineer, and when I decided to become an artist, I continued to explore this question in a different way. It is an analytical approach, a way of looking at the world, and a way to question it. I frankly appreciate all the dimensions of it and will continue to explore them, but I think that the strongest and the ones that give me the biggest satisfaction are the most abstract approaches, the ones that are the most remote from reality and still apply to many aspects of reality, existing or perceived. Black Square (2016), where a flock of white pixels try to enter an invisible square and bounce on it thus revealing it, can lead to multiple interpretations. It is a fundamental delicate situation. 

Antoine Schmitt. Black Square Video Recording, 2016

The signature element in your work, the pixel, is introduced in Le Pixel Blanc (1996). There, you describe it as “a minimal artificial presence… something that almost did not appear, but that still would be «there».” Over time, the pixel has gained more presence and become as much an object, a presence, and an absence, as part of a flow or the representation of an individual. How would you describe the evolution of your conception of this basic element and its influence on your work?

The pixel and the square are omnipresent in my work. I like my artworks to be minimal, like mathematical theorems. This naturally led to the pixel, the minimal visual element in the universe of the computer. A pixel is a small square, and by enlarging it, you get a large square. And like Malevich, I consider the square like the symptom of the human being’s power and curse: the ability of abstraction These two elements are the basis of most of my artworks. What I work on is their movement, relatively to the space around them, or relatively to the other elements. They are minimal but open to all the possibles, through their movements and the infinitely rich possibilities of programming.

“The pixel and the square are minimal but open to all the possibles, through their movements and the infinitely rich possibilities of programming.”

Your career spans almost three decades, in which you have explored many different formats of creation and distribution, from multimedia projects on CD-ROM, to Internet-based artworks, interactive installations, video mapping, screen-based pieces, software art, live performances, generative cinema, NFTs, and much more. What is your opinion on the way technology has evolved over these decades and how it has influenced art making? How have you experienced this period of constant innovation and obsolescence?

These have been very exciting years, for one because computers are more and more pervasive (we all now have a powerful computer in our pocket) and also because art made with computers is now widely accepted. It is therefore easier to create programmed artworks and to show them. The technology is more easily available, the distribution channels — in the wide sense — are numerous and the audience is listening.

On the other hand, technology is nowadays mainly used for advertising, surveillance, entertainment and manipulation of opinions, which is a social problem and has an effect on art made with technology. Many approaches build upon or react to these social dimensions, which are all needed and interesting but leave little room for the more conceptual and radical approaches. This may be true for all forms of art, but it is stronger with technological art as technology so much shapes our society these days.

Antoine Schmitt. FaçadeLifeGrandPalais. Generative mapping at the Grand Palais in Paris, 2016

What is interesting also is that I think that no new concept was really born in the field since Alan Turing invented the computer, the “universal machine”. All computer-based technologies are avatars of this unique concept. This can probably account for the fact that my artworks have not radically changed since I started. My work does not reflect on the social impacts of technology on society, nor are impacted by the various technological “innovations” and obsolescence. It is minimal so does not make use of the innovations toward more “power”, and it is rather rooted deeply in the concepts of the universal machine which have not changed : with a universal machine, all thinkable processes are programmable.

“Art made with technology often builds upon its social dimensions, which are all needed and interesting but leave little room for the more conceptual and radical approaches.”

You were already working with generative text twenty years ago, in The Automatic Critic (1999). What is your opinion about the current trend among artists to use machine learning models such as ChatGPT?

Although I am quite impressed by the quality of the interactions of users with ChatGPT (I thought that this level of quality would take more years to happen), the generative approach on these systems are in the normal continuation of the original concept of the computer. We are at the stage of imitation: these algorithms generate media that look like media created by humans, as the central mechanism of neural networks is pattern recognition and pattern generation, whether it is text, images, music, reasoning, etc… This is quite fascinating for users and it is similar to the caricatural mirror effect that I was referring to at the beginning. The art, or more generally the forms of expression, created by these algorithms in imitation of ours are a mirror to our forms of expression and thus question them.

But art is intention and responsibility. These two notions are still unique to humans. But maybe one day, we will be able to create an algorithm able to feel pain, express it with intention towards its fellow humans and take responsibility for it. There is no theoretical impossibility for this in the theory of the universal machine and I look forward to it.

In the meantime, as an artist, the most interesting aspect of AI systems remains for me the creation of biased algorithms which focus on some dimension of human nature, like Deep Love (2017) which answers all questions with “I don’t know, but I love you.”

Antoine Schmitt and Franck Vigroux. Tempest. Audiovisual concert, 2013

You entered the NFT scene in 2021 with Buy Me! a particularly conceptual, and generative piece. What has the NFT market brought to your practice? Has it influenced your production? Have you found new forms of creation or sources of inspiration, beyond its commercial dimension?

It took me some time to understand that the main new concept behind the NFT market boom was the perspective of financial profit, for collectors and for artists. This is the reason I created the satirical piece Buy Me! (2021), which embodies an algorithm desperately trying to convince its viewers to buy it, using language techniques inspired by advertising and psychological manipulation. It is a piece on the processes of marketing.

Apart from greed, the NFT market has opened the field of computer art to a new audience, which was really interesting, but I am eager to see the fusion of the traditional art market with NFT seen as a new way to buy and collect artworks.

Antoine Schmitt. The Fall of Leviathan. Interactive installation, 2021. Photo: Quentin Chevrier

You recently quoted the mathematical theory of catastrophes to describe the year that has begun and may bring sudden change, positive or negative. How does this year look for you? Which upcoming projects can you share with us?

I am very excited to start a collaboration with the DAM Projects gallery in Berlin. Its owner, Wolf Lieser, has been involved in computer art for a few decades and I look forward to working with him and his team. We will start with a solo show next autumn, with a selection of historical works and new artworks.

I am also very excited by two new live audiovisual performances, Videoscope and Nacht, with Franck Vigroux, which are in the making, and that will tour the world along with the existing performances (Melbourne, Gijón, San Francisco, etc..).

It was never about replacing the artist: AI and post-creativity

Pau Waelder

The following text is an excerpt from my contribution to the book The Meaning of Creativity in the Age of AI, edited by Raivo Kelomees, Varvara Guljajeva, and Oliver Laas (Tallinn: EKA, 2022). The volume is focuses on critical observations of the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in the field of the arts and includes contributions by artists, art professionals, and scholars Varvara Guljajeva, Chris Hales, Mar Canet Solà, Jon Karvinen, Luba Elliot, Oliver Laas, Raivo Kelomees, Mauri Kaipainen, Pia Tikka, and Sabine Himmelsbach.

The book, which addresses key questions currently being debated around AI systems such as DALL-E 2 and Chat GPT, has been recently made available as a free PDF.

Cover of the book The Meaning of Creativity in the Age of AI (EKA, 2022)

Can you teach your machine to draw?

On 5th February 1965, during the opening of Georg Nees’ exhibition of algorithmic art at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, there was an exchange between the engineer and an artist who asked him provocatively if he could teach the computer to draw the same way he did. Nees replied that, given a precise description, he could effectively write a program that would produce drawings in the artist’s style (Nake, 2010, p.40). His response echoes the conjecture that had given birth to the field of artificial intelligence ten years earlier: that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it” (Moor, 2006, p.87). It should be noted that, at least at this point, the machine is not meant to think or create, but simulate. In his seminal paper from 1950, Alan Turing already suggested that computers could perform an “imitation game” (later known as the Turing Test) in which the aim was to mimic human intelligence to the point of seeming human to an external observer (Turing, 1950).

Therefore, what Nees asserted is that the computer could create a successful imitation of the artist’s work. The exchange between Nees and the artist did not go well, as the engineer’s vision of a computable art seemed to threaten the superiority of artistic creativity. Upset and resentful, the artist and his colleagues left the room, with philosopher Max Bense trying to appease them by calling the art made with computers “artificial” (Nake, 2010, p.40) – as opposed, one might think, to a “natural” art made by human artists. The need for this distinction denotes the uneasy relationship between artists and their tools, the latter supposedly having no agency at all, being mere instruments in the skilled hands of the artist.

The computer introduced an unprecedented level of autonomy: the artist only needed to write a set of instructions, the program did the rest.

Certainly, there had been some room for randomness and uncontrolled processes to emerge in the different artistic practices that had succeeded each other during the 20th century, but until that point creativity was unquestionably anthropocentric, with the artist (or their assistants), at the centre of the creation of every artwork. The computer introduced an unprecedented level of autonomy: the artist only needed to write a set of instructions, the program did the rest. This was challenging for artists at a time when few had seen a computer and even fewer knew how to write a program or understood what it could do.

Vera Molnar. Untitled. Plotter drawing. Ink on paper, 1968. Courtesy DAM Museum

Despite the profound differences from our current perception of computers, over fifty years later, AI still holds the same fascination and is subject to the same misunderstandings as early computer art. The initial rejection of computer-generated art has turned to uncritical enthusiasm, and the prospect of an art that does not need human artists has been celebrated with a spectacular sale at Christie’s. But the artist was never out of the picture. 

Pioneering computer artist Vera Molnar created her first artworks in the 1960s with a “machine imaginaire”, a program for an imaginary computer that helped her develop a series of combinatorial compositions of geometric forms and colours. In 1968, she started working with a real computer (which back then was only available at a research lab), but she has always stressed that the machine is, to her, nothing but a tool: “The computer helps, but it does not ′do′, does not ′design′ or ′invent′ anything” (Molnar, 1990, p.16).

“The computer helps, but it does not ′do′, does not ′design′ or ′invent′ anything”

Vera Molnar

Another pioneer, Frieder Nake, recalls the experience of creating his first algorithmic drawing in 1965, underscoring his role as the creator of the artwork:

“Clearly: I was the artist! A laughable artist, to be sure. […] But an artist insofar as he – like all other artists – decided when an image was finished or whether it was finished at all and not rather to be thrown away. I developed the general software, wrote the specific program, set the parameters for running the program. […] I influenced the process of materialization by choosing the paper, the pens, and the inks; and I finally selected the pieces that were to be destroyed or to leave the studio to be presented to the public.”

Nake, 2020

Manfred Mohr, one of the first artists to work with computers who, like Molnar, had a background in fine arts instead of mathematics, has frequently stated that his artworks transcend the computational process they are based on: “My artistic goal is reached” he states, “when a finished work can visually dissociate itself from its logical content and convincingly stand as an independent abstract entity” (Mohr, 2002). 

Manfred Mohr. P032.Plotter drawing on paper, 38 x 38 cm., 1970. Courtesy DAM Museum

Algorithmic artists have played with the balance between control and randomness, always keeping a direct involvement in every part of the process of creation, from the code to the final output. The software, however, can be allowed a greater portion of the decision making. This is what Harold Cohen did in 1973 when he developed AARON, a computer program designed to generate drawings on its own, with no visual input, based on a complex series of instructions written by the artist.

Influenced by the ideas that were being discussed at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the time, Cohen sought to understand how images were made. AARON aimed to answer that question by creating drawings that simulated those of a human artist, without human intervention. Cohen stressed AARON was “not an artists’ tool” but “a complete and functionally independent entity, capable of generating autonomously an endless succession of different drawings” (Cohen, 1979). This autonomy led to thinking about AARON in cognitive terms, with Cohen himself stating that the program “has a very clear idea of what it is doing” (Cohen and Cohen, 1995, p.3). For over four decades, the artist kept developing the program, establishing a relationship that he described as the kind of collaboration one would have with another human being:

“AARON is teaching me things all the way down the line. From the beginning, it has always been very much a two-way interaction. I have learned things about what I want from AARON that I could never have learned without AARON”

Cohen and Cohen, 1995, p.12

Cohen’s work prefigured the current applications of AI systems in art making, not only in the way the program worked but also in its role as a collaborator rather than a mere tool. 

Harold Cohen. Arnolfini series. Plotter drawing, ink on paper, 1983. Courtesy DAM Museum

Artists working with artificial neural networks nowadays describe their experience in similar terms to those expressed by AARON’s creator. When Anna Ridler created her own dataset of 200 drawings to train a GAN for her animated film Fall of the House of Usher I (2017), she sought to push the boundaries of creativity by producing an artwork that is a machine generated interpretation of her drawings, which in turn represent scenes from a silent film based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The outcome has led her to wonder where is the “real” artwork, and to doubt the role that the program plays in its making: “I do not see a GAN as a tool like I would think of say a photoshop filter but neither would I see it is as true creative partner. I’m not really quite sure what is is” (Ridler, 2018).

For Patrick Tresset, working with robots that can draw in their own style enables him to distance himself from his work: “I found it very difficult to show my work, as a painter, as an emotional thing, and the distance that we have with the action when you use computers, that you are not directly involved… makes it far easier for me to exhibit” (Upton, 2018).

Memo Akten explores the structure and functioning of artificial neural networks and uses Machine Learning as a form of exploring human thinking: “My main interest,” he states, “is in using machines that learn as a reflection on ourselves, and how we navigate our world, how we learn and ‘understand’, and ultimately how we make decisions and take actions” (Akten, 2018).

Gregory Chatonsky criticizes the perception of the artist as purely autonomous and the machine as a simple tool, while describing his creative process as an interaction with the software that not only generates images but also spurs his imagination: “Working with a neural network to produce images or texts,” he states, “I perceive how my imagination develops, becomes disproportionate and germinates in all directions. I try to adapt to this rhythm, to this breath. It’s almost alive” (Chatonsky, 2020).

Artists have carried out a dialogical relationship with the software they have used, considering it not just an instrument, but a collaborator.

These statements show that artists have carried out a dialogical relationship with the software they have used, considering it not just an instrument, but a collaborator. However, the deeply entrenched perception of the artist as the sole creator of the artwork, in full control of every aspect of the outcome, looms over this partnership insisting that either the machine is to remain a mere tool or it is destined to take over the artist’s role.

Anna Ridler. Mosaic Virus. 3-screen GAN video installation. 2018-2019. Courtesy DAM Museum

Towards post-anthropocentric creativity

The question whether a machine can be creative is recurrently asked as AI systems increase their capabilities and become more sophisticated. Recently developed systems such as CAN (Creative Adversarial Network), which is taught to deviate from the examples it has learnt in order to produce new types of images (Elgammal et. al., 2017), or DALL-E, which can generate images from text descriptions (Ramesh et. al., 2021), illustrate how far computers can go in creating visual content.

CAN has even been used in an attempt to pass the Turing Test, that is, to produce machine-generated art that appears indistinguishable from that created by an artist. The results have been disputed in a study that shows a preference for art made by humans and suggests that what should be asked is not if AI can create art, but whether the art created by AI is worthy (Hong and Ming, 2019).

What should be asked is not if AI can create art, but whether the art created by AI is worthy.

Seen from this perspective, the debate pivots to more practical considerations: what can AI do, and how can it be used? GANs are widely employed by artists nowadays, but they tend to generate the same type of images because of the limitations of the programs and the processors. In this sense, the artificial neural networks are not particularly creative because they do not produce anything that breaks out from a set of established parameters and similar outputs. The creativity stems from how artists use these images and assign them a certain narrative. Therefore, to expect machines to become creative by following problem-solving approaches seems limiting and even counterproductive (Esling and Devis, 2020), given that we don’t even understand how creativity works and cannot translate it into computable formulas.  

Instead of asking whether an AI system can replace an artist, it would be more interesting to consider how artists can expand their creativity using AI. This proposition does not imply considering the artist as the sole creator of the artwork, but moves past this preconception to embrace a notion of creativity that includes all the actors involved, human and non-human.

Guido Segni. Demand Full Laziness. Lot 2018/000022. AI-generated image, 2018.

Jan Løhmann Stephensen suggests the terms “postcreativity” or “postanthropocentric creativity” to challenge the idea of creativity as something that is exclusive to humans and a marker of human “greatness” (Løhmann, 2019). Through the lens of postcreativity, we can consider artworks as the outcome of an interaction between a variety of actors, including humans, objects, systems, and environments. In AI-generated art, this means taking into account all the people, animals, natural environments, institutions, communities, software, networks, etc. that take part, more or less directly, more or less willingly, in the artwork’s making.

This opens up deeper reflection on how the piece is created, as do Anna Ridler and Memo Akten in their examination of the artificial neural networks they use. It also allows artists to distance themselves from the specific output while retaining authorship of the process, as do Patrick Tresset and Guido Segni – the latter currently engaged in a five year project titled Demand Full Laziness (2018-2023), in which he outsources his artistic production to a deep learning algorithm trained with images from his moments of rest. Overall, it emphasises the potential of co-creation between humans and machines, in which computers do not mimic, but expand human creativity. 

Through the lens of postcreativity, we can consider artworks as the outcome of an interaction between a variety of actors, including humans, objects, systems, and environments.

Artificial Intelligence has developed at a growing pace over the past seven decades, and it will continue to do so, bringing new challenges and possibilities for computer-generated art. As several authors point out, AI is currently at a stage equivalent to the daguerrotype in photography (Aguera, 2016; Hertzman, 2018), and it is difficult to predict what novel forms of creativity it will unfold. It might well be, if AI were to reach a stage of consciousness or self-volition, that a program may not be interested in producing a drawing or a photograph and would rather express itself through elegant programming code or a beautiful mathematical equation. Or, maybe it would even create art that is not intended for humans to understand, but is addressed to fellow AIs. 

This text was written in March, 2021

References

Aguera, B., 2016. Art in the Age of Machine Intelligence. Medium, [online].Available at: https://medium.com/artists-and-machine-intelligence/what-is-ami-ccd936394a83 [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Cetinic, E., and She, J., 2021. Understanding And Creating Art With Ai: Review And Outlook. Cornell University [online] Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09109 [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Chatonsky, G., 2020. Imaginer avec le possible des réseaux de neurones. Gregory Chatonsky, [online]. Available at: http://chatonsky.net/imager-neurones/ [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Cohen, B. and Cohen, H., 1995. Conversation: Harold Cohen & Becky Cohen. In: The Robotic Artist: Aaron in Living Color Harold Cohen at The Computer Museum. Boston: The Computer Museum. Available at: https://dam.org/museum/essays_ui/essays/the-robotic-artist/ [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Cohen, H., 1979. What is an image?. AARON’s home, [online]. Available at: http://www.aaronshome.com/aaron/publications/index.html [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Cohn, G., 2018. AI Art at Christie’s Sells for $432,500. The New York Times, [online]. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art-sold-christies.html [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Elgammal, A., Liu, B., Elhoseiny, M., Mazzone, M., 2017. CAN: Creative Adversarial Networks Generating “Art” by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms. Cornell University [online] Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07068  [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Esling, P., and Devis, N., 2020. Creativity In The Era Of Artificial Intelligence. Cornell University [online] Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.05959v1 [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Hertzmann, A., 2018. Can Computers Create Art?. Arts, 7(2), 18. [online] Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/arts7020018 [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Hong, J. and Ming Curran, N., 2019. Artificial Intelligence, Artists, and Art: Attitudes Toward Artwork Produced By Humans vs. Artificial Intelligence. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl., 15(2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3326337 [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Løhmann Stephensen, J., 2019. Towards a Philosophy of Post-creative Practices? – Reading Obvious’ “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy.” In: Politics of the Machine Beirut 2019 (POM2019). [online] Beirut: BCS Learning and Development Ltd., pp.21-30. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/POM19.4 [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Marcus, G. and Davis, E., 2019. Rebooting AI. Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust. New York: Pantheon Books.

Mohr, M., 2002. Artist’s Statement. Ylem Journal, Artists using Science & Technology, 22(10), p.5. 

Molnar, V., 1990. Lignes, Formes, Couleurs. Budapest: Vasarely Múzeum.

Moor, J., 2006. The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years. AI Magazine, 27(4), pp.87-91.

Nake, F., 2010. Roots and randomness –a perspective on the beginnings of digital art. In: W. Lieser, ed., The World of Digital Art. Postdam: h.f. Ullmann, pp.39-41.

–– 2020. Three Drawings and one Story. DAM Museum, [online]. Available at: https://dam.org/museum/essays_ui/essays/three-drawings-and-one-story/ [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Ramesh, A., Pavlov, M., Goh, G., Gray, S., Voss, C., Radford, A., Chen, M., Sutskever, I., 2021. Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation. Cornell University [online] Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12092  [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Ridler, A., 2018. Fall of the House of Usher. Datasets and Decay. The Victoria and Albert Museum, [online]. Available at: https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/guest-blog-post-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-datasets-and-decay [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Russell, S. and Norvig, P., 2010. Artificial Intelligence. A Modern Approach. Third edition. Boston: Prentice Hall.

Turing, A.M., 1950. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, LIX(236), pp.433–460. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433 [Accessed 14 March 2021].

Upton, D., 2018. Interview with Patrick Tresset by David Upton for the Computer Arts Society. YouTube, [online]. Available at: https://youtu.be/vb1Cj0fVq1M [Accessed 14 March 2021].