...Makes a Machine That Makes the Art
Sol LeWitt was a prolific American artist credited with founding Conceptual Art and Minimalism. This talk is inspired by his series of participatory, conceptual art called, "Wall Drawings". The Wall Drawings are large-scale installations that grow from a set of simple written instructions by Sol LeWitt himself.
Each Wall Drawing is the culmination of Sol LeWitt using his instructions to collaborate with human assistants that interpret his writings to the best of their ability. LeWitt once stated, "The Idea Becomes a Machine that Makes the Art." This begs the questions: Which is the art, the idea, the execution, or both? At what point is the human the tool and the tool an artist?
We will continue this mode of thought and question whether the work generated by a machine trained by humans (following the instructions of the artist, Sol LeWitt) can be considered art. We will explore a human-machine collaboration using human and AI assistants that will install interpretations of Wall Drawings in a virtual space online.
We will give different Wall Drawing prompts to human assistants so they can interpret and create versions of Sol LeWitt's art. Given the data from these human assistants, we will train neural networks to generate their own work based on these prompts using machine learning techniques such as RNN, LSTM, and GAN. Finally, we plan to feed these back into a collaborative environment for both human and AI assistants.
Christine Stavridis
Jonathan King
Prompt & Pleasant
Prompt & Pleasant is a digital practice comprised of Christine Stavridis and Jonathan King. We are exploring ways to make the seemingly inaccessible, accessible.
