Control A

In response to Haz's AI Art stream last night, lets start by looking at what Haz says Art is and what it is not:

• Something that merely looks cool or looks nice or satisfies some base instinct. Video game concept art, anime girls, porn and pseudo-porn, furry stuff, etc.
• Static 2D images, which ended with Malevich's 1915 black square.
• Individual pieces by individual artists. "Art can't be produced by individuals anymore, it's irreversibly socialized."
• Art for the sake of comfort and cuteness. These are not a legitimate pursuit for art. "You're just a consumer trying to consume."
• Single works. "There's no single picture or single image, movie, TV show, or anything that suffices to constitute a work of art now."

• Themes from multiple works which thread together a gestalt. "Art arises only in bulk - a flood of cheap stupid shit within which you can discern a singular artistic vision."
• Art is made inadvertently by a community.
• Art should inspire you to work, not consume.
• "Art is about delivering to the viewer some insight and appreciation into the reality you take as a premise."
• Art is about continually overcoming art's own premises.
• The project of Infrared.

So I'll start by posing some questions about "art" that seems to continue past the point where its themes, genre, or medium has been foreclosed upon. E.g., an abstract non-representational painting AFTER Malevich, or a superhero comic AFTER Watchmen. Is this kitsch? Zombie art? What can we say about the fact that there are new oil paintings every day? And what can we say about the populist idea offered up by Alec Baldwin's character in 30 Rock that "paintings are pictures of horses and ships with sails."

Because art is delivered by some kind of network effect, rather than individual pieces which come under the scrutiny of an expert, Haz seems to grant the idea that 1 individual iteration of an AI Art piece is not art both by virtue of their discreteness and by virtue of much of it being single images. (And not just single images, but bitmaps, 1024x1024). Memes, pinterests, aesthetics, worldsbuilding, movements, happenings, etc. Cultures, basically. These are the art mediums that correctly reflect our age. Art now IS CULTURE, rather than being an atomic unit of culture. But because Haz then goes on to critique Vaporwave, I'm left confused. Vaporwave, seemingly, is both the inaugural offering and apotheosis of this tendency.

I think Haz confuses the mournfulness of the content of Vaporwave for its form. It is a nostalgic rear-facing aesthetic specifically it is a premature mourning for the kinds of effects of runaway positive feedback loops anticipated by Nick Land, and doubted by Haz later on. Let's talk about that for a bit.

Haz points to the Trump presidency as evidence of a homeostatic tendency that undergirds the concept and reality of America/"America". These are negative feedback loops, or maybe it would be better to say "properly-steered" cybernetic loops. So we can't assume that everything will dissolve in the universal technological acid. But later on Haz points to loops that already are starting to run away. Spiderman/Elsagate is specifically mentioned. These are phenomena that game the systems they are suspended in. In the context of AI you would call these mis-alignments. I'd like to see some countervailing pressures against catboy-ification before I rule out that it's not at least a potential "paperclip." Andrew Tate is not going to cut it. As Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy so eloquently put it "That cowboy shit is strictly for fags."

Haz later says "We're responsible for shitty output of AI algos - that's not AI's fault, that's our fault as a society. It's inadvertent, but we're responsible for it. Don't blame the technology". I agree with this and still I am pessimistic about it. Like I said yesterday, the corpus we feed to these demons is mostly anime, porn, anthro, cat, vidya, content. These are dopamine-milking kinds of themes. The landscape work you get from AI is Kinkaid shit! AI, not as a technology but as an actualy fact, represents the tyranny of a philistine majority.

Let's go back to our appreciation for Malevich's black square because I want to demonstrate why AI could never achieve it, and people can. And then finally I'll use the black square as an exemplar of what I personally think the next artistic movement will encompass thematically. Art, in Malevich's time, evolved rapidly from figurative forebears, to impressionism, through cubism and fauvism, bypassed that HACK Kandinsky, and arrived at abstract non-representational Suprematism. Malevich's ability to contemplate the cultural frame within which art was produced and escape it, is a talent that AI lacks because AI necessarily produces works along well-establish ruts in our cultural mud. It works by sameness. This is why even WITH their corpus... ...the results we see are inevitably cafe-wall kitsch. It can't produce white on white, and it certainly couldn't produce a work which indicts the premises of AI, or of art-making generally today. The final point I'll make is that we have only seen the jpeg version of Malevich's black square. So, considering the importance of materiality and presence and the piece's reflection on canvas and pigment as themes, that is as good as not having seen it at all. If we're actually taking the lesson of the painting, we need to foreground materiality. So for this reason I await an Art AI that changes material conditions in my life beyond just flipping bits on my hard drive.

And for me, that AI is TEMU BABY IM SHOPPING LIKE A BILLIONAIRE!