Bubblegum Club

Tag: activist

  • Seize The City Season 2 // Reflecting youth and subcultural moods

    Seize The City Season 2 // Reflecting youth and subcultural moods

    Strobe lights cut through the crowd with shades of blue, red and white. Sweaty bodies are dictated to by the vibrations moving from the speakers through the floor. A rundown building in the middle of Johannesburg’s city centre is transformed into a sonic experience with the invitation to queer space through one’s presence. Yellow cups float between the people on the dance floor with the name of the party translated into a declaration of intentions – Seize The City.

    Jose Cuervo‘s Seize The City Season 2 was a moment to fully embrace the now, expanding on their motto, Tomorrow is Overrated. As a kind of call-to-arms for every rebel and nightlife activist, the party served as a platform to celebrate young people in Johannesburg and the energy they inject into the city through their cultural production and subcultural expressions. Taking place in a functioning recycling depo in Selby, the space echoed this sentiment, with fragments of the underground 90s rave scene flying in and out of memory.

    Well known as well as up-and-coming artists, designers and other creatives were present, indicating the significance of the space for young creatives. “It felt like an Instagram feed coming to life. A lot of people you see on the internet were there and a lot of internet friends able to connect,” states Natalie Paneng, artists and Seize The City attendee.

    Fashion mirrors cultural moods, and subcultural foundations, and this had a strong presence. Fashion played an important role as a signifier of taking the spirit of the party to heart, while also reflecting the spirit of the people who attended. Oversized pinstriped blazers, stockings used as tops, the bra as a shirt, platform shoes, fanny packs trapped across chests, combined with pins, fishnet stockings and pale pink sunglasses. DIY aesthetics engulfed in the flames of unapologetic self expression. An experiment in styling and self-making, on an individual and collective level.

  • Writer and activist Achal Prabhala on expanding the parameters for what is considered knowledge

    Writer and activist Achal Prabhala on expanding the parameters for what is considered knowledge

    “When books are scarce, people are knowledge”

    This is a quote from an email interview I had with Bangalore-based writer and activist Achal Prabhala. It is an introduction to the thinking behind the Oral Citations Project – a project he was involved in which explored alternative methods of citation for Wikipedia and ways to redefine who or what is understood to be a knowledge source.

    As a writer, the majority of his work focuses on race and pop culture. However what ties his writing together is his accumulated work in small publications, which he describes as “beautiful, odd magazines” in our exchanges via email. These include Bidoun, Chimurenga, Transition and African Is A Country. As an activist, he currently works on increasing access to medicines for life-threatening conditions like AIDS, cancer and Hepatitis C in India, Brazil and South Africa.

    The Oral Citations Project aimed to bring the periphery to the centre, and simultaneously expand on the way in which knowledge is defined. However, before unpacking the project it is necessary to contextualize its presence.

    Wikipedia has been criticized as a site for reflecting a Western, male-dominated mindset. This is translated into the way in which knowledge sources used for Wikipedia articles are framed, mimicking the old encyclopedias it is supposed to replace. Some critics have stressed the tradition of footnotes and sourced articles as references and citations needs to be re-thought. This is relevant as there is an abundance of knowledge that exists outside of books and the internet that cannot be present on Wikipedia because it cannot be sourced and referenced within the package that Wikipedia requires. Following on from this critique, Achal, who was an adviser to the Wikimedia Foundation at the time of the project, embarked on unpicking this policy and finding a way to present information that did not fit into that mould. This resulted in a short film titled “People are Knowledge“, which demonstrated how much knowledge is lost due to Wikipedia’s citation and verification policy, as well as provided an opening to be able to allow the site to be more inclusive of other knowledge sources.

    The project was planned with three Wikipedia languages in mind – Malayalam, Hindi and Sepedi – and took place across various places in South Africa and India. It involved interviews with academics and ordinary people to document everyday practices that had not been shared on Wikipedia before due to the limitations mentioned above.

    I had an interview with Achal to find out more about the project and if it has assisted in expanding Wikipedia’s knowledge base.

    When conducting interviews, how did you explain what Wikipedia is to the people who had never heard of the site before?

    This is a great question. Let me start by explaining who we interviewed and how. I interviewed people along with Wikipedians who knew them; for instance, in South Africa, we interviewed people in Ga-Sebotlane, a remote rural location in Limpopo, and I was guided by Mohau Monaledi, who lives in Pretoria, but is from Limpopo, and speaks Sepedi. Mohau is a prolific Wikipedian, and founded the Northern Sotho Wikipedia project, which is now a little gem of the Internet: it went from 500 articles in 2011 to over 8000 currently. It is the largest South African Wikipedia after Afrikaans. I was one of the people who helped get it off the ground, and I’m enormously proud of where it is today, way ahead of larger language groups in the country like Zulu, and even on the continent, like Igbo.

    The people we spoke to were working women who were fluent in Sepedi, but not English. They were women who worked in their houses and on the land, and had been doing it for years. Cellphones were common, but none of them had heard of Wikipedia. So, we explained what we were doing, explained what Wikipedia was, and why we wanted to talk to them. They got it immediately. It’s important to note that we weren’t asking the women we interviewed to part with family secrets or private historical memories: we were talking to them about how they prepared Mokgope (a fermented drink made with Marula fruit), and how they played popular village games such as Kgati and Tshere-tshere. In other words, we were interested in bringing everyday aspects of their lives to Wikipedia, and they liked the idea.

    How do you explain the importance of documenting everyday practices to the people you interviewed who fell outside of the academic space? What were their reactions?

    I will confess, wherever we went – from Limpopo in South Africa, to Kerala and Haryana in India – we were met with enthusiasm, but also puzzlement. A number of people I met in Ga-Sebotlane and Thrissur were just flat-out amused that anyone would be interested in documenting the most mundane aspects of their existence. I am almost as much a foreigner in rural India as in rural South Africa, and I suspect they thought of me as some crazy guy who had to be indulged. But once we started asking questions, and they could see our intent was serious, I think they were quite thrilled that someone was showing interest. It’s been beaten into our heads that we have a lot to learn from Professor Humdrum at Harvard, but not so much from Ms Moremi in the field under the Marula tree in Limpopo. And by us I mean not just you and me, but also the people under the Marula tree.

    Speaking for myself, the moment I flipped that ridiculous assumption within my own head, and treated the people I was talking to as important people with important things to say, they saw themselves that way as well. The mere act of listening made it easy for people to see themselves as repositories of knowledge – and this switch was a joy to watch, like a light being turned on.

    Unpack the importance of inserting underrepresented people, practices and languages online, particularly on a site associated with the collation of knowledge sources such as Wikipedia?

    The answer to this question is important. The answer also makes me furious, so I’ll take a deep breath first.

    All right. Let’s take what we did in Limpopo. We created articles, based on our conversations with people, on Mokgope, Kgati, and Tshere-tshere. Until that point, these things did not exist as public knowledge on the internet, even as they had existed for decades as public knowledge in everyday life. Millions, if not all South Africans, know exactly what these things are. Let us consider their equivalents in France: Pastis (which should be a human rights violation) has a detailed Wikipedia article in 22 languages; Pétanque has a detailed Wikipedia article in 41 languages; Boules has a detailed Wikipedia article in 31 languages.

    At this time, because of the project we ran, Sepedi Wikipedia has one article each on Morula, Kgati and Tshere-tshere. Detailed articles, with interviews as citations, and pictures to go with words. No knowledge of these three things, however, exists in any other language; the articles have not been translated. Arguably, no one who speaks Sepedi needs reminding what Morula is. Just as, arguably, the English world would be expanded by a formal understanding of what Morula is. But that hasn’t happened, because English Wikipedia deems Sepedi knowledge unworthy, as well as suspect – since in the case of these three articles, it isn’t based on something published in a book – and we’ve given up holding our breath.

    France has 66 million people. South Africa has 56 million people. Person for person, they’re not that different. On Wikipedia, however, they’re worlds apart. One is a country with Human Beings who Know Things; the other is not. I recounted my experience of documenting village games in India and South Africa to a German scholar.

    He jokingly said, if these were village games in Germany, they would each be given a 7-volume manual to accompany them, and would have become Olympic sports by now. I laughed, but it’s true. I don’t think Mokgope, Kgati or Tshere-tshere are any less real because there’s no record of them in books or the Internet, or because Europeans have no idea what they are. But the legitimation, transmission and circulation of knowledge holds a unique power in the world: the power of universality, the power to render holders of that knowledge fully, equally and undeniably human.

    By far the most tiresome aspect of conducting the exercise was explaining it to Wikipedians. I had some really strange conversations on public mailing lists. The prevailing view on Wikipedia was best expressed by a German historian resident in the Netherlands called Ziko van Dijk. I explained my project. He replied with the condescension of a schoolteacher scolding a naughty child, and asked me to leave history to the historians. I tried to point out that documenting one beverage and two village games in Limpopo hardly constituted messing with history. He did not budge; he remained adamant that my secret agenda was to infect Wikipedia with mythological juju. He kept at it for years, advocating increasingly bizarre theories, such as that recognising oral traditions would, somehow, allow him to claim to be a descendant of Charlemagne. (For good measure, he also threw in an inexplicable incident about “a territory in Africa, occupied by the British” where some King was maybe thought to have had seven sons, and then maybe thought to have had only five, which was, in his view, conclusive proof that you must never trust anyone without a PhD in history).

    Unpack the title for the project and the film, People are Knowledge?

    When books are scarce, people are knowledge.

    I don’t think of this as a problem. It’s simply a fact. It would be nice to have more books, sure. But, as Geetha Narayanan says in the film, “Coming from a culture where so little is written down, do we then say we know nothing?” The assumption that people who don’t have books are dumb, is plainly preposterous. In the course of rearranging our ideas about books, knowledge and stupidity, however, there are some underlying conditions to consider.

    One: Rich countries produce plenty of books, poor countries do not. Every year, the UK produces 1 new book for every 300 people. In South Africa, however, the figure is 1 new book for every 7000 people, and in India, even worse, at 1 new book for every 11000 people. In historical absolutes, the number of books produced in the US and Europe outstrips every other country in the world. What this means is that the knowledge of South Africa and India is not in books.

    Two: Even when local books exist in poor countries, they’re inaccessible. Public library networks are weak, digitization and electronic access is almost non-existent, with the effect that if you live in a country like India and South Africa, and want to reference an existing book, it is frequently not available to you.

    Three: Even when there is media – books, periodicals, journals, newspapers – to cite, if the media comes from a country outside the US and Europe, it is suspect, at least on Wikipedia. Countries like South Africa and India may have huge newspapers that cater to millions of readers, but Wikipedia refuses to accept that something happened unless it happened in the New York Times. The most famous instance of this bias is with the fictional Kenyan phenomenon called Makmende, which, despite being written up in The Daily Nation and The Standard, two respected Kenyan newspapers with gigantic readerships, was refused a Wikipedia entry until the story merited a mention in a ‘real’ paper, the Wall Street Journal. We’re told the way to play the game is to catch up. Write more! Publish more! Then, when we do that, we’re told, umm hold on: that’s not good enough. Because, of course, nothing really happens unless it happens in a journal published out of Cambridge or a newspaper in Manhattan. And Wikipedia is passionately committed to this warped, outmoded, colonial view of the world. Instead of playing the imitation game, I thought, why not turn the tables?

    On your project site, I read the argument that Wikipedia does not take advantage of “internet objects”. Can you share why this is an important statement when thinking about expanding citations on Wikipedia?

    Wikipedia is a publisher on the Internet, but it is deeply suspicious of the Internet. This is a fundamental fault line, and it is already fracturing Wikipedia. When you have a new system of publishing, one that is non-profit, public, and supposedly revolutionary, a system that was made by the Internet and that could only exist on the Internet and moreover, relies on the anonymous labour of crowds to work, in that case, to exclusively rely on words printed on paper for authority is ludicrous.

    Wikipedia is an open platform that is made entirely by user contributions. But it disallows citations from IMDB (the Internet Movie Database) and classifies it as an unreliable source, because, wait for it, IMDB is an open platform that is made entirely by user contributions.

    In the early years of Wikipedia, in 2005, Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia) was fond of saying “We help the Internet not suck.” That was then, before blogging became legit, before the smartphone was invented, before social media took over our lives. Now, in 2018, thanks to the combined force of cheap data, cheap Android phones and social media, we have infinite choices. There are many ways in which social media sucks, but one way it definitely does not is in being a fairly democratic global force in which anyone can participate.

    In 2005, Wikipedia was pitched in a fierce battle for legitimacy against the print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, and it was arguably better than anything on the Internet. In 2018, Britannica is dead, Wikipedia reigns supreme, and, I would argue, it has become considerably less democratic, less open, less global, less diverse and less inclusive than anything else on the Internet. Everything on Wikipedia says 2001, especially its deliberately maddening interface, but nothing says ‘hello yesterday!’ as much as its refusal to treat the Internet as a place of knowledge, or its refusal to learn the one useful lesson social media can teach us, which is that projects prosper by inviting people in, not by keeping most of the world out. Let me put this more simply. If I wish to learn about French food, which I can’t eat, because I’m lactose intolerant, I’ll go to Wikipedia, but if I wish to learn about South Indian cuisine, which I can eat, and love, I’ll go to YouTube.

    In a New York Times article on your project, you mention that publishing is a system of power. Could you please unpack this, and how this fits into the foundation for People are Knowledge?

    I’m from Bangalore, in India. I studied in the US, but haven’t worked there. The only countries I have  lived and worked in outside my home are South Africa and Brazil. Currently, my work is spread across Bangalore, Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro. So I know what unequal geography looks like, and I am intimately aware of how colonialism lingers in the mind long after it’s officially gone. I knew a whole lot about Manhattan before I stepped foot in it; I knew very little of Johannesburg before I got there. I knew that words said in London were meaningful; I knew that words said in Bangalore were kind of meaningless.

    One of the nice things about becoming an adult was becoming confident enough to challenge this idiocy. And because the Internet existed when I grew up, and especially because Wikipedia existed, I believed, naively, that this was our great opportunity to rewrite the world. Let’s face it: we will never catch up with the accumulated mass of formal knowledge produced by Europe and the US. Not going to happen.But in the digital world? I did think it was the one place where we could have a kind of equality; new rules for a new world. Every movement in the last 20 years signaled that equality was near: the invention of Wikipedia, the drop in telecom prices, the proliferation of cheap Chinese smart phones, the millions of people coming online in places like India, Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa.

    And yet, it did not work out that way. Publishing has always been about power.

    In the 14th century, you could be killed for translating the Bible into languages people actually spoke. In the 15th century, the printing press gave rise to new anxieties, and for several centuries thereafter, printers in Europe were only permitted to operate with the approval of their monarchs. Things may seem to be completely different now, but a deep dive into the political economy of the book will make it clear we are still operating with a command-and-control version of knowledge. The colony may have come and gone, but knowledge remains a thing produced in the centre – and consumed in the periphery.

    Wikipedia’s lamentable dependency on the book, continuing in this long, grand, and incredibly racist European tradition, is why we in the periphery are avid consumers of Wikipedia, but not producers. Publishing is a system of power, and so is Wikipedia. You look at Wikipedia, and think, hey, it’s on the Internet, it’s made by volunteers, it’s got pop singers and porn stars, anyone can contribute, it must be revolutionary. But don’t be fooled: it’s merely the old system of power, wrapped in a dazzling gauze of technological emancipation and repackaged with a benevolent liberal bow. Don’t take my word for it. Instead, take just one of Wikipedia’s own published statistics: there are more producers of Wikipedia in the Netherlands (population 17 million) than the entire continent of Africa (population 1.2 billion).

    Are you still connected to the Wikimedia Foundation?

    I’m not. I served on the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2006 to 2018. I quit, or more accurately, I certainly quit a board that I’m not certain exists, since the Advisory Board has been in a Kafkaesque limbo for some years. I did some good during my term, as well as some things that did not turn out well. I’m proud of helping start the South African chapter, which is flourishing, and not so proud of helping the Indian chapter come into existence, since it blew up in a hot cloud of incompetence and ineptitude. I played a part  in pushing for the Wikimedia Foundation to directly intervene in stimulating producers in India, Brazil, and the Middle East, and I’m glad to have played an early role in pushing the Wikimedia movement to recognize affiliations from broad groups of people, like Catalan speakers, not just those from sovereign states.

    In the end, however, as a result of my work in India, and especially as a result of my work on oral citations, the trolling and harassment from other Wikipedians simply became too much. The hostility was insane: every discussion, every interaction online, was toxic. At the same time, the Wikimedia Foundation decided it had not much use for me. I’m not sure which was worse, being attacked by the community, or being ignored by the Foundation 🙂 Either way, I knew it was time to go.

    How has Wikipedia’s citation policy/strategy changed since the conceptualization of this project?

    The short answer is not one bit. In fact, it’s moved in the other direction, with the rules becoming even tighter. Wikipedia is now unapologetically hostile. If you came to Wikipedia in 2001 and put in some text, it would stay, as long as it was reasonable, and other Wikipedians would work with you to improve it, by adding citations and so on. Try that today, and you’ll be shut down immediately, then flamed, and then shamed into never contributing again. Every new contributor is essentially treated as a hostile vandal or a paid public relations agent until proven otherwise. Of course, it doesn’t help that many new contributors are, indeed, hostile vandals and paid public relations agents. It’s an impossible problem, and the encyclopedia anyone can contribute to has made no attempts to solve it, save for aiming a giant blowtorch at anyone who tries to contribute.

    But it’s not all bad. A few good things came out of the oral citations project. The first is a set of independent initiatives that sprung up, to work along similar lines. Peter Gallert, an academic in Namibia, is working on a project to bring indigenous knowledge to Wikipedia. In San Francisco, Anasuya Sengupta, Siko Bouterse and Adele Vrana, three former Wikimedia Foundation staffers, have launched a grand and exciting initiative to remake Wikipedia. (One of their campaigns is to pry Wikipedia away from the hands of young men, and reverse the giant tide of sexism within; you can help them by contributing images of women to Wikipedia). The second nice thing is that the Wikimedia Foundation finally seems to have figured it out: a key plank in its new strategy is to “focus…efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.” Given that it’s the community that decides policy, not the Foundation, I’m curious to see where this goes.

    How are you expanding on the project at the moment?

    Having burnt only some of my bridges with Wikipedia so far, I’m now working on ways to burn all my bridges with the community. I’m kidding. Seriously, though, I’m writing a short account of being the brown guy in the ring. I think Wikipedia has got away with intolerable amounts of racism, sexism and hostility just because most people only see it from the outside, slot it as a ‘good thing’, and don’t ever find out about what is going on inside.

    Having said all that, I should make a confession: I love Wikipedia. I loved it the moment I first saw it, and I’ll always love it. To me, Wikipedia is the public park of the Internet; a refuge from the relentless shopping-mall the Internet has turned into, the brave little non-profit in the oligopolistic dystopia that is our online landscape. When Wikipedia is good, it’s wonderful. When Wikipedians are good, they’re great. So I’m going to stick around for a bit, shout from the sidelines, and see if it has any effect. It’s ironic I spend so much time criticizing Wikipedia, because all I’ve ever wanted, really, is to be allowed inside. I’m not sure it’s entirely rational to want to enter a park run by confused white supremacists, but I’ve been going there for so long, I’ve become quite attached to it. Sure, Wikipedia is a racist, sexist and violent enterprise, but it’s my racist, sexist and violent enterprise, and I’ll figure out a way to deal with it.

    Further reading:

    A push to redefine knowledge at Wikipedia

    Lifting the lid on a Wikipedia crisis

    The Believer Interview with Achal Prabhala (The Believer)

    Is Wikipedia woke?

    We’re all connected now, so why is the Internet so white & western?

  • The replacement of human artists by machine generated algorithms

    In a rapidly changing digitized world many careers have already seen a death in human occupation, such as quality control checkers in factories that have been replaced by machine generated algorithms. This bring about the question of what this digitization and the soon to be, if not already, redundant nature of certain career paths means for the arts. The art space has seen a sweep of digitization, and today there are algorithms creating art. Does this art reach a perfection and appeal that human made art cannot? And what does this mean for human artists? Will they be replaced by machines? What does this mean for art history? Are these new “innovations” changing the face of our history?

    What has been coined the biggest artistic achievement of 2017 took place in an Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab (AAIL) on the main campus of Rutgers University, New Brunswick in New Jersey, USA. Professor Ahmed Elgammal put a new art writing algorithm through a computer on the 14th of February and witnessed how it created a number of images which left him awestruck. In response to his sighting the professor conducted a unique Turing test (developed by Alan Turing in1950 and tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human) in order to establish how his AI’s digital art ranked against museum-graded canvases (Chun 2017).

    His test took the form of a randomized-controlled double-blind study in which participants were not able to differentiate between the computer’s art and that of human artists. His findings indicated that the computer-made images were in fact preferred by the participants, who referred to them as “aesthetically pleasing”. The paper based on his Turing test ignited an unnerving rumour within the art world – the AI was able to paint like Picasso (Chun 2017).

    Following the Turing test Elgammal wanted to move the AI away from fabricating existing artworks and instead create new artworks entirely. The training involved feeding the algorithm over 80,000 digital images of Western paintings from the 15th to the 20th century. Utilizing his own image-generating system – Creative Adversarial Networks (CANs) the machine developed an aesthetic sense and learnt how to paint. The algorithm had one main purpose for Elgammal; to create art that had the appearance of being created by a human brush (Chun 2017).

    Finally, a time came where the machine’s art met the bar of museum worthy imagery. The machine was creating abstract work however and strayed away from portraits and still lifes. Elgammal emphases the revolutionary nature of CAN in an interview with Artsy “If you feed the machine art history from the Renaissance to the present and ask it to generate something that fits into a style, the natural progression would be something along abstract aesthetic lines. Since the algorithm works by trying to deviate from style norms, it seems that it found the answer in more and more abstraction. That’s quite interesting, because that tells us that the algorithm successfully catches the progression in art history and chose to generate more abstract works as the solution. Abstraction is the natural progress in art history.” (Chun 2017)

    What Elgammal is saying then is that the algorithm did that which many human artists would do in the same situation and produced the same sort of striking images that would catch the eye of curators and/or art critics. Creating art that fell under the classification of ‘Dutch Masters’ would simply not be exciting enough to a viewer and lead to habituation or fail to arouse a response to repeats of this stimulus. Plainly put, to make an artwork appealing to its consumers the visual stimuli of an artwork must have arousal potential in order to create a trigger – referred to by psychologists as a “hedonic response” (Chun 2017).

    In his text, ‘The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change’ (1990), psychologist Colin Martindale implies that the successful artist integrates novelty in their art. His hypothesis is that the increase in arousal potentiality neutralises the observer’s certain habituation retort. This escalation in creative novelty, nevertheless, needs to be decreased to hinder negative viewer response. Furthermore, he believed that “style breaks” are embraced by artists as a means of securing unpredictability and more attractiveness for their audience over an extended period of time. Could this concept be used to base an art algorithm on? Elgammal states “Among theories that try to explain progress in art, we find Martindale’s theory to be computationally feasible.” (Chun 2017)

    In 1966 Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) was founded by Bell’s engineers, Fred Waldhauer and Billy Klüver including artists Robert Whitman and Robert Rauschenberg. The pioneering Bell Labs project set the foundation that all computer-created art is based on today. The introduction of new computer technology meant that new machine-generated art followed soon after. This included: dot matrix printer art (1970s), video game art (2000s), 3D-printed art (2010s). The exceptionality of Elgammal’s computer images can be found in the happening of these images marking the first time in history that an A.I. has created work without any human assistance or interference (Chun 2017).

    The Greek artist Panos Tsagaris’ ‘Untitled’ 2015 work – a mixed media canvas tinged with gold leaf – was displayed at Art Basel 2016 in Hong Kong and utilized as a sample image for Elgammal’s AAIL tests. The artist expresses that A.I. art is fascinating and regards the algorithm as a peer and not a disturbing threat. (Chun 2017)

    “I’m curious to see how this project will progress as the technology develops further. How human-made paintings generated by a machine look is one thing; bringing the A.I. artist to the level where it can create a concept, a series of emotions upon which it will base the painting that it will create is a whole other level.” I want to see art that was generated in the mind and heart of the A.I. artist.” he expresses (Chun 2017).

    Art critic and historian James Elkins is more sceptical, “This is annoying because [algorithms] are made by people who think that styles are what matter in art as opposed to social contexts, meaning, and expressive purpose. “One consequence of that narrow sense of what’s interesting is that it implies that a painting’s style is sufficient to make it a masterpiece.” He argues that “If human artists were to stop making art, so would the computers.” (Chun 2017)

    Images generated by CAN

    Michael Connor, the artistic director of Rhizome (a platform for digital art), agrees with Elkins. “This kind of algorithm art is like a counterfeit. It’s a weird copy of the human culture that the machine is learning about.” He does nonetheless feel that this is not necessarily bad: “Like the Roman statues, which are copies of the original Greek figures, even copies can develop an intrinsic value over time.” (Chun 2017)

    Elgammal’s algorithm conforms to the same development process as the human artist – “In the beginning of their careers artists like Picasso and Cézanne imitated or followed the style of painters they were exposed to, either consciously or unconsciously. Then, at some point, they broke out of this phase of imitations and explored new things and new ideas. They went from traditional portraits to Cubism and Fauvism. This is exactly what we tried to implement into the machine-learning algorithm.” (Chun 2017)

    Having had its first solo-machine show in October of last year, ‘Unhuman: Art in the Age of A.I.’ in Los Angles the algorithm is steadily rising traction as an emerging artist. Elgammal’s algorithm has ample room to grow its career as the coders at the Rutgers lab are able to increase the “arousal potential” of its artworks (Chun 2017).

    What is at stake or what human artists should fear is this; the algorithms’ founder predicts that its art will only get better over time. “By digging deep into art history, we will be able to write code that pushes the algorithm to explore new elements of art. We will refine the formulations and emphasize the most important arousal-raising properties for aesthetics: novelty, surprisingness, complexity, and puzzlingness.” (Chun 2017)

    Elgammal is of the opinion that this technology will lead to an infrastructure development that supports his “arousing” art. This will include galleries, online auctions, agents and authenticators fronted by another AAIL algorithm (Chun 2017).

    Before getting rid of our artworks crafted by humans it is important to consider the following historical occurrence. In 1964 an engineer and computer pioneer at Bell Labs, Michael Noll conducted his own Turing test. His test was conducted by programming a General Dynamics microfilm plotter and an IMB computer to spit out an algorithmic creation of the Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Lines’ (1917). His digital image was projected onto a cathode ray tube and recorded with a 35mm film camera. A duplicate of the print, ‘Computer Composition with Lines’ was shown to 100 people curated next to an image of the 1917 artwork by Mondrian (Chun 2017).

    What was observed from all this was a striking trajectory. 59% of the subjects in the test took preference to the computer-generated image as opposed to the Mondrian original. What was even more remarkable is what took place a year later when Noll’s digital art was exhibited at Howard Wise Gallery in New York, (the first-time computer created art was shown in an American art gallery) – public interaction was poor and not a single art work was sold (Chun 2017).

    Nevertheless, Noll retained his optimism for the future of digital art production. He wrote in 1967: “The computer may be potentially as valuable a tool to the arts as it has already proven itself to be in the sciences.” And so,the mad scientist invents a machine that becomes more intelligent, more artistic – not a tool to aid artists but to replace them. What do we make of a machine that has the capability to become more human than the humans? (Chun 2017)

    But what if I told you that since and even before the inception of digital curatorial spaces such as Instagram, humans have been impersonating algorithm art? From art schools to gallery circuits a prevailing style of abstract painting is coming afore. This style has been called “Zombie Formalism” (basically Neo-Modernism or Crapstraction) by critics. Its characteristics have been singled out as spinoff-ish and pretentious; making use of the vertical format for convenient Instagram hosting. These works that have been digitized and “filtered” in some cases is where the masquerade of human based art lies (Chun 2017). It does however go further than that, think of digital artists who work with gifs, text messages and screen recordings to produce work – all a game of mimicking technology.

    This irony then acts as a catalyst for conversations about a near dystopian future and the possible end of culture. Will humans have to paint more like robots? (Chun 2017) The crapstractionists deviating from the norm are already paving the path towards work that is less human and are altering art history to an extent that they might not fathom at present.

    Even deeper than all this is the fact that we have come to a moment in time where images have undergone a massive transformation. The vaster majority of images are made by machines for machines and humans are not involved in the process. As Trevor Paglen states, “We’ve traditionally thought about images and the role they play in society as being centered on a human observer—a human looking at an image. But we’re now at a point where most of the images in the world are invisible. What I’m talking about when I say, “invisible images” is the advent of autonomous seeing machines that don’t necessarily involve humans, and that’s the majority of the types of seeing that’s going on in the world now.” (Abrams 2017)

    Can a machine fulfil the functions of being an artist when being an artist is so much more than creating art? Being an artist intrinsically means being a teacher, being an activist and commenting on and critiquing the times that they are situated in. There is also the philosophical and art historical question – what is an image/artwork if humans are not needed to create it? Not to mention the political and ethical questions linked to means of observing as they are also a means to forms of power (Abrams 2017). These factors must not be dismissed so easily and the divide is real and apparent whether humans choose to acknowledge it or not. Humans are slowly being replaced by machines but a machine could never be an artist and fill the scope connected to this classification. It fails to inhabit a human form; for now.