Art Loops

A creative system involves artist, art and viewer in an information-generative feedback loop. A creative system’s success can be measured by the amount of information generated. Some art conveys a deep message to a targeted audience, some a shallow message to a general audience. The art that fails to reach anyone returns to dust. The art that achieves both depth and breadth disseminates via mechanical reproduction, and can be considered extraordinarily successful. Hans Haacke is an artist more aware of the feedback loop than perhaps any other. His pieces are site-specific reflections upon the politics and environments of the art world. Some work is more reserved: Condensation Cube is a plexiglass box which maintains an equilibrium with the museum climate, showing the water cycle in isolation. In a more aggressive gesture, Haacke produced a series of framed photographs and text: Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. The series outlines the shady dealings of a landlord named Harry Shapolsky. Haacke created the piece for a show at the Guggenheim Museum, which the trustees promptly cancelled when learning of the plan. This act of censorship is of course the best affirmation Haacke could hope for.

Condensation Cube

Hans Haacke

1963 - 1965

Water in plexiglass

Influence of the three components of a creative system— artist, art and viewer— is not evenly distributed. Some artists lend creative control to the viewer directly. Some encode complex ideas fully in the work itself, some rely on wall text, some offer only abstractions. At the center of all art is metaphor: colors become sentiments, figures become archetypes, symbols abound. It is through metaphor that an artist expresses ideas. Good art is both surprising and relatable. A good artist blends deliberation with instinct— they intend to represent something, but remain open to the influence of their medium. By being beautiful, or funny, or eye-catching, the art invites viewers to spend time interpreting it. The artist relies on large swaths of overlapping taste, or else finds the right audience. 

Creative art presents ideas not otherwise available to the senses. Images of mythical creatures, extinct creatures, and creatures of an artist’s invention are examples of creative art. Representing these three kinds of creatures well requires a biological understanding of how animal bodies work and look, a practical understanding of an artistic medium, awareness of historical context, and an experienced aesthetic to fill in the gaps. Often the most challenging part of creation is deletion. Much creativity happens in the edit. Robert Rauschenberg is infamous for his Erased de Kooning Drawing. To paraphrase his interview on the piece by SFMOMA, it was a continuation of his series of white painted canvases. He began by erasing his own drawings but was unsatisfied, and decided it must be art first. So he went to de Kooning, whom he considered the most indisputably artistic, and asked for a drawing. After careful consideration, de Kooning selected a piece that was both dear to him and inclusive of several different media, making it as difficult to erase as possible. Rauschenberg says the piece took three months, and uncountable erasers.

Erased de Kooning Drawing

Robert Rauschenberg

1953

Drawing media on paper

Creative systems occur at micro and macro levels simultaneously. At the center of this scale is the local ecology of an artist creating and viewing their own work.  To the left of the scale are subroutines of neurons and nerves. To the right are collaboratives, institutions, and arenas. The richer the subsystems, the more successful the work. This idea reveals the first opportunity for a synthetic creative system: unlike a typical human artist, a robot feels no different painting in a studio than in a gallery. Viewers are often left unaware of what goes in to a piece, and artists are often secretive about their process. Viewers can watch a robot work with unabashed curiosity. If designed to work quickly, a robot can even take willing viewers on as subjects.

The Robotic Gaze

I began the morning by reading a fantastic summation of the male gaze. Not the happiest way to start out, but a subject at the back of my mind. I recently watched two movies at opposite ends of a cultural spectrum: The Godfather, and Cannonball Run II. The latter was so unredeeming I left the room and was bitterly chastised for over-sensitivity. The former had obvious merit and I stayed the course. But it was so male dominated that I didn't feel offended, I felt bored. There was so little I could relate to. My interest was sustained by the beauty of the shots and Marlon Brando's acting, and by my husband's delivered promise of a good parting shot. The only woman who really speaks is Diane Keaton. She's wonderful, but in her two big scenes she's a walking incarnation of this footnote from The System of Objects:

12. 'Loud' colours are meant to strike the eye. If you wear a red suit you are more than naked — you become a pure object with no inward reality. The fact that women's tailored suits tend to be in bright colours is a reflection of the social status of women as objects. - Jean Baudrillard, 1968

It was fortuitous to read this text and see this movie for the first time within weeks of each other. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I love this section of the book; here is what surrounds the footnote:

The world of colours is opposed to the world of values, and the 'chic' invariably implies the elimination of appearances in favour of being:¹² black, white, grey — whatever registers zero on the colour scale — is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing.

'Natural Colour'
Colours would not celebrate their release from this anathema until very late. It would be generations before cars and typewriters came in anything but black, and even longer before refrigerators and washbasins broke with their universal whiteness. It was painting that liberated colour, but it still took a very long time for the effects to register in everyday life. - p. 30

The good news here is that robots are ungendered. They're unburdened by history, with the potential for an aesthetic unshaped by its influence. Maybe they'll show us that the female human form is objectively beautiful and we were right all along. Maybe they'll show us something different. I really love the photos my robot Nila takes while she's painting, and am trying to figure out how to expand this with Neko.

The viewer never saw the image feed from Nila's camera, because people like looking at their own image, and I wanted them to look at Nila. I think I'll change this with Neko, and am experimenting with different modes of interaction.

To cleanse the palate, here is my favorite piece of art on the subject. The camera is given its rightful place as neutral observer. Below is an interview with the artist by MoMA.

Picture for Women, Jeff Wall, 1979

How Color Works

Color is a signal. It's an interaction between radiating bodies, reflective surfaces, and vision systems. Radiating bodies, like a lamp or the Sun, undergo a chemical process that emits energy in tiny packets called photons. These photons travel along wavelengths varying across the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. At the low-energy end of the visible sub-spectrum is red, with a very long wavelength. At the high-energy end of the range is violet, with a very short wavelength. After traveling the path of least resistance the photons hit the retina of the eye, stimulate rod and cone cells tethered through the optic nerve to the brain, and become the phenomenon of light, color, and image.

Twilight in the Wilderness, Frederick Edwin Church,  1860

Consider this Hudson River School painting of a sunset. We call sunlight white but it's technically golden, and this is exaggerated at sunset, when atmospheric haze makes it easier to see the star. The light is generally white because the photons emitted by the Sun are full-spectrum. This does not mean all photons travel at an average value; some photons travel on the red wavelength, some on the green, etc. Each color occurs with a roughly equal proportion, so they blend as beams into white. Church used Lead White (now deprecated) under secretive blends of oil, wax and resin to give his painted Sun internal reflection.

As matter interacts with photons on the journey to Earth, the wavelength dictates each color's reaction. The sky is blue because the paths of the short blue waves are more prone to collision. The blue light scatters easily in atmospheric dust and moisture. Church used a pigment called Cerulean, which was developed for skies, despite being a little too green. Interestingly, if our vision was more accurate, the sky would be violet. Our brain makes it blue. Our art history makes it turquoise.

Clouds are wonderful paint and color subjects. They're generally white, because the water vapor that composes them diffracts sunlight and makes them glow. When clouds are dense with vapor, on the brink of rain, less light escapes and they turn gray. At twilight only the photons on longer waves reach the clouds, lighting them up red like fire. Of course that's a bad analogy because we tend to see fire at relatively low temperatures— reds and yellows are called 'warm colors' while blues and greens are called 'cool colors,' despite the fact that blue light is hotter than red.

The remaining colors in the painting are desaturated but mostly green: the predominant color of plant-life. Terra Verte is a likely pigment. Plants live through a process called photosynthesis: photons from sunlight provide the energy to chemically bond carbon dioxide to water, forming carbohydrates. The subroutine of translating light energy to electric energy occurs in the photosynthetic reaction center: a mesh of proteins and pigments. Chlorophyll is a typical pigment— chlorophyll absorbs the blue and red light, and reflects the green. If a plant's leaf is the color of Terra Verte, that is its resonant frequency. The leaf system stores vibrational energy at that frequency, so the Terra Verte photons are amplified upon reflection. A well-informed painter might also know Terra Verte has been used as an undertone for flesh since the 11th Century, and can subtly anthropomorphize a landscape.

Neko the Modernist

Modernism is a movement in philosophy and art, concerned with self-examination. It begins by discarding all a priori knowledge, and building up a system of evidence-based understanding. The modernist uses their medium to examine the medium itself.

“[Modernist art] happens to convert theoretical possibilities into empirical ones, in doing which it tests many theories about art for their relevance to the actual practice and actual experience of art.” Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, 1960

Neko's database will allow him to correlate words to colors to pigments. It's my hypothesis that he'll reveal a wealth of information about color can be used in painting to represent different concepts. I consider him a color field painter.

“Through its fetishization of the base, the sculpture reaches downward to absorb the pedestal into itself and away from actual place; and through the representation of its own materials or the process of its construction, the sculpture depicts its own autonomy.” Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, 1979

Autonomy is the goal as I reconstruct Neko. This will come through 1) a well-balanced feedback system with me, viewers, and the work; 2) a unified, articulate, transportable body and pedestal ; 3) a well-organized archive.