Journal of Visual Arts Practice Volume 7 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd

Article. English Language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.7.1.11/1

Intellectual process, visceral result: human agency and the production of artworks via automated technology

Michael Betancourt

Abstract Automated technology that produces art presents specific issues for interpreta- tion: where should the artwork be situated – in the objects the machine pro- duces, the machine itself, or the design for the machine? Central to this question is the issue of human agency in the creation of art. This paper examines these issues in relation to the implications of Sol LeWitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, and frames the question of human agency in relation to the work of con- temporary artist Roxy Paine, and the historical artists Mary Hallock-Greenewalt and Richard M. Craig who created autonomous systems for making visual music. These artists’ work involves automated technology that functions without their intervention. These works suggest a framework that recognizes the artist’s role as the designer of art, rather than as necessarily the fabricator of those works.

In the New York Times art review ‘Computer Generated Pictures’, published on 8 April 1965, Stuart Preston made an eerily prescient prediction in his review of the first computer art exhibit:

[Some day] almost any kind of painting can be computer-generated. From then on all will be entrusted to the ‘deus ex machina.’ Freed from the tedium of techniques and the mechanics of picture making, the artist will simply create.

(Preston 1965)

When one considers the painting- and sculpture-making machines of Roxy Paine, for example, it is tempting to believe this situation has come to pass, raising the implicit question of Preston’s comment: what does the artist do that qualifies as ‘simply create’ if the artist actually needs to do nothing to produce a particular artwork? This question is the problematic provoked by autonomous systems: if computers can produce art without the need of the artist to guide them, then what could be called ‘Preston’s problematic’ appears: the artist may surrender their agency in the creation of art to a machine, rendering themselves irrelevant to the creation of art.

Automated systems for making art present specific problematics for human agency, and they apply equally well to earlier developments in automated technological art, such as Mary Hallock-Greenewalt’s Sarabet, a technological instrument that began as an automated, mechanical system for visual accompaniment to music; or in the work of other artists who constructed

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Keywords new media art conceptual art process computer-

generated art

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automated colour organs such as Richard M. Craig (Betancourt 2004). The implications of Sol LeWitt’s comments on ‘conventions’ suggest a possible framework for thinking about art making in a way divorced from human activity, if not human agency.

LeWitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art, 1968’ includes four sentences that directly mention working with/within the ‘conventions of art’. These sentences are significant because they propose that art making is explicitly a matter of conditions that determine the work of art by creating a network of potential approaches to its facture. As a whole, the twenty statements suggest that the conventions of art are historically contingent objects (Poggioli 1968: 56), directly influenced by the art they describe. This is a dynamic situation, where the conventions constrain the potential objects, which can be art as they are affected by those objects (Eco 1984: 66–67). These sentences are representative of a shift in conceptual art from the creation of objects to the generation of specific conditions for the creation of art based on ‘the artist or somebody else fabricating or describing the piece as equal conditions for the production of [the art], thereby abolishing the notion of artist centered production’ (Alberro 2000: xxii–xxv), a situation that has explicit implications for automated art, since the role of the artist is extremely atten- uated when compared to, for example, a handmade (manually produced) painting.

However, where conceptual art abolishes the object as well as the artist’s physical labour in creating the artwork, LeWitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ still assumes that there will be some type of object produced from the artist’s activity; this feature of his articulation makes his comments more directly applicable to any theorization of human agency in relation to automated art-making systems. The significant factor in such a framework is how the human agency is separated from the mechanical aspects of actually making the work. LeWitt’s comment that ‘The idea becomes a machine that makes the art’ (Lippard 1997: 28) is a good example of this framework in action and provides a point of reference for considering these statements as the basis for a theory of human agency:

(17) All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conven- tions of art. (18) One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present, thus misunderstanding the art of the past. (19) The conventions of art are altered by works of art. (20) Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.

(LeWitt 1972: 174–175)

While LeWitt mentions ‘conventions’, and uses the term as if it is unques- tioned what these ‘conventions’ may be, the precise nature of that con- cept is unclear. Understanding the specific nature of these conventions clarifies their application to contemporary work by artists, such as Roxy Paine, where the question of human agency is central: when devices create art autonomously, determining what constitutes human agency is neces- sary in order to decide what constitutes the art. What is at stake in this sit- uation is the status of the objects produced; this interpretation assumes

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that art is dependent on human agency, so the relationship between human agency and the autonomously produced object is crucial.

Creating a framework for human agency in relation to autonomous sys- tems depends on understanding the meaning and role of conventions. The two most apparent approaches to the meaning of this term are not directly opposed, but neither do they provide an understanding of what can be done with the conventions. The first would take conventions to mean those rules for selecting from possible objects for inclusion in the category ‘art’, and would provide guidelines for ranking those objects hierarchically. The second understanding of this term shows methods to interpret the works already in the category called ‘art’, and aids in developing arguments about their significance and meaning (Danto 1990: 217–231).

Both approaches to the meaning of conventions assume that the received meaning of art (i.e. the traditional definition) is not in doubt. Such a usage of conventions takes the form of a lexicon of established ways and means – practices having particular meanings as a result of their repeated use. Making art with this view of conventions is essentially academic; the conventions are received dicta not open to question, debate or investigation.

However, within LeWitt’s statements there is a third understanding of these sentences that suggests that conventions are directly connected to the process of making the works themselves: a set of rules invented by the artist based on their particular interests, using history as source and refer- ent. This approach can be understood in terms of (a) avant-gardism and those objects that may be included as art; or (b) interpretation, work com- menting on its historical embeddedness; or (c) as a comment on the direct influence that an artwork can have on subsequent work – how all art is interpreted by each new work’s expansion/comment on the history of art. The third interpretation is one which emphasizes process. This would be the ‘productive’ interpretation of the ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’.

This third interpretation raises (again) the question of human agency in making art. Approaching conventions as a set of rules whose application will determine a particular work enables a view of human agency separated from the fabrication of the artwork: an approach that has ample historical support ranging from Marcel Duchamp’s readymades through the use of commercial reproduction, and even the historical debate about photogra- phy as art. It is a history where the removal of direct, clear human agency (as in manually produced artworks) results in a denial of the status ‘art’. Each of these historical examples raises the question of human agency anew. They are all examples of Preston’s problematic where deciding a work is art demands a new consideration of human agency in regard to fabricat- ing artworks.

The concept of ‘axioms’ from the field of mathematics provides a useful parallel for conventions in art. Viewing conventions as axioms makes them into a function of the framework used in the working process. LeWitt states that these constraints – when drawn from the history of art – form the con- ventions an artist employs in the process of making artwork. The crux of his sentences is the relationship an artist has to the source of those conven- tions: given the breadth of art history, it is arguable that these conventions could take potentially any form; his comments suggest that creating the

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boundaries necessary for working becomes part of the artist’s work (or is the art itself ).

Art objects exist simultaneously as objects for interpretation and as expressions of specific conventions whose relationship may not be self- reflexive: the conventions themselves are separate from any meaning that may result from following those conventions. The concept of ‘style’, as used to describe traditional art, can be understood to perform this role. The creation of a convention set (whether explicitly as conventions or implicitly through style) provides the logic of the sequence. These conventions pro- duce a network of potentials that enables the creation of the individual work. This framework necessarily constrains the physical form of the work and the possibilities for depiction within that form.

LeWitt’s conception of conventions suggests a radically different view of the artistic creative process, one much closer to mechanical design than the action of ‘genius’. The artist chooses/creates the conventions that are the operational parameters for the artwork, then constructs objects within that field of potentials. Whether this fabrication is manually or autonomously done makes no difference to the issue of human agency because the crucial decisions about the art takes the form of conventions, rather than the artist’s labour in making objects. LeWitt’s sentences propose a typical approach to conceptual art that can allow the instructions to become the work, eschewing objects in favour of the audience mentally creating the art; Yoko Ono’s fabrication of her ‘instruction paintings’ in the 1990s (Ono 1995) demonstrates the feasibility of these instructions in the actual creation of objects.

When making art becomes an autonomous process, the aesthetics of the work are literally built into the machine itself. This issue is especially clear with an entire category of art-making devices called ‘colour organs’. Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, an early developer of colour organs (and inventor of new technologies), described two specific potential approaches to colour music (Hallock-Greenewalt 1946): (a) the live, virtuoso performance and (b) automated performance, where a machine performs using a pre- arranged set of instructions for colour music (Betancourt 2005). The auto- mated approach (b) has been employed by various other artists whose machinery responds to music following a predetermined set of potentials; this latter variety is the ‘music visualizer’ now a common feature on most computers.

What these machines all have in common is that the decisions about the relationship between sound and image must be made by the artist a pri- ori to the construction of the device: the visualizer cannot exist without these conventions. The determining factor separating one music visualizer from another is what it does – i.e. what conventions it establishes in how it visualizes music.

Hallock-Greenewalt’s machines create very different effects from Richard M. Craig’s Radio Color Organ. His machine was specifically designed to gen- erate autonomous visual accompaniment to broadcast music (Betancourt 2004: 167–171). Whether the artist or someone else then manufactures the machine is irrelevant since the significant choices – the artist’s agency as artist – determine the machine’s function. The artist chooses which con- ventions to follow and which to ignore, constrained only by the technology

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available; Hallock-Greenewalt was forced to invent new technologies to enable the construction of her visual music instrument, the Sarabet. This technologic limitation is not one of aesthetics derived from art history, but an engineering problem.

The historical development proposed by Clement Greenberg in ‘Modernist Painting’ where each successive new art is a historically mandated reduc- tion towards purity (Greenberg 1986: 85–93) cannot apply to works created within this framework because the conditions which would allow such development no longer apply (Danto 1990: 46). Any art that asserts such a framework would (ironically) appear either ahistorical or quotational, rather than simply a manifestation of a historically mandated art. LeWitt explicitly states this situation in ‘(19) The conventions of art are altered by works of art’. As Arthur Danto has observed,

The philosophical question of the nature of art, rather, was something that arose within art [following the 1960s] when artists pressed against boundary after boundary, and found that all the boundaries gave way.

(Danto 1990: 15)

These boundaries were defined by traditions that the avant-garde systemat- ically attacked and destroyed between the 1860s and the 1960s, with the resulting effect that artists entered into the new historical moment uncon- strained by the tradition that Danto describes; LeWitt’s sentences are a product of this changed relationship to the past.

Implicit in this framework is an understanding that conventions are specifically serial; a particular historical framework presents constraints on the potentially available forms (called ‘aesthetics’). Making art requires the elaboration of specific groupings of conventions whose choice is funda- mentally arbitrary (a matter of the individual artist’s choice rather than mandated by any external authority such as an academy or tradition). Umberto Eco explains what this conception of ‘seriality’ means:

The real problem is that what is of interest is not so much the single variation as ‘variability’ as a formal principle, the fact that one can make variations to infinity. Variability to infinity has all the characteristics of repetition, and very little of innovation. But it is the ‘infinity’ of the process that gives a new sense to the device of variation.[…] What becomes celebrated here is a sort of vic- tory of life over art, with the paradoxical result that the era of electronics, instead of emphasizing the phenomena of shock, interruption, novelty, and frustration of expectations, would produce a return to the Cyclical, the Periodical, the Regular.

(Eco 1984: 46)

In describing serial forms, Eco also identifies the atomization effected by conventions. The return to repetitious, continuous forms is not as surpris- ing as it sounds from Eco’s description. The demands imposed by the adaptation of aesthetic methods towards procedures adoptable by auto- mated production, with its historical foundations in the assembly line’s breakdown of production into modular components joined into a seamless whole. Eco’s observation that the ‘era of electronics’ effaces fragmentation

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in favour of continuity is a return of the classical idea of ‘transparency’ where the actual manufacture of the artwork is hidden from view, instead presenting an illusion of seamless facture; this transparency is also a goal of designers who develop computer software (Pold 2005: par. 6), suggest- ing a possible inverse correlation between the experience of interruption provided by the technology and transparency, i.e. the greater the interrup- tion, the more it will be used to create a transparent experience.

As Paine’s machines or Hallock-Greenewalt’s Sarabet demonstrate, con- structing a machine of any type is an issue of engineering, and building a device capable of producing the desired result requires an explicit descrip- tion of any physical product that particular machine will make. An explicit iteration of conventions is required for the design of machinery for the auto- mated creation of artworks. Machines for fabricating art therefore make the conventions of art an immanent part of their design; i.e. their conventions (the aesthetics they employ) are an emergent property available through examining their design. These conventions are also apparent through the product (the art) created by the machine’s operation. At the same time, the approach to creating art this framework describes is one in which the artist assumes the role of designer, in effect separating the fabrication of the art (including the manufacture of the machinery) from the decision-making process that leads to that art.

Situating human agency at the decision-making stage of the art’s pro- duction creates two distinct ways to view the function of the framework in producing the art. Emphasis can be placed on either (a) the machine itself, or on (b) what the machine produces. Robert Scott’s discussion of Paine’s robots for making art – built to function like an automated assembly line – clarifies this issue:

Paine’s PMU (Painting Manufacture Unit), 1999–2000 provides a perfect example of this rigorous engineering… . To make just one painting, the process [the machine follows] may repeat itself between 80 and 200 times, without any intervention whatsoever from the artist… . Paine’s insistence on this technical exactitude and lack of superfluous detail reveals his surprisingly mechanistic understanding of the inventions he aptly regards as ‘labor saving devices’. By automating processes lasting from many hours to many days, they spare the artist’s time and attention, rendering his engaged presence irrelevant to the creation of the work.

(Rothkoff 2001: 21–25)

Paine’s use of the computer as a technical device avoids the physical labour of the artist, since once set in motion it will make art without any further need for assistance. If the artist’s programming and design of the machine gains emphasis, as in Scott’s description of the Painting Manufacture Unit, it makes the result simply a proof that the machine does what it should. This ‘proof of function’ interpretation literalizes LeWitt’s comment that ‘the idea becomes a machine that makes the art’. Viewing what the machine makes as a proof of function renders those works simply an iteration of fol- lowing the instructions, specifically displacing the art from the fabricated works onto the machine itself and its processes, something Paine’s concept of labour-saving devices argues against. The same lingering scepticism that

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denied photography the status of art for the first century of its existence is evident here in the tendency to deny the art produced by a machine status as an artwork, even though that machine follows the artist’s specifications precisely.

What is at issue with these works is the question of human agency in the creation of art: what role must the artist have in relation to the creation of the art for it to be immediately acceptable as art? Paine’s work, while provocative in this regard, ‘plays it safe’ by exhibiting both the mechanism and the results of its functioning. The presentation of both autonomous machine and its products together avoids the problematic this work sug- gests by allowing the proof of function interpretation, an approach that is less readily available if the machine is not exhibited in conjunction with the work produced.

This paper proposed a framework for understanding art making based on human agency divorced from direct human action that is implicit in the idea of conventions suggested by Sol LeWitt in his ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art, 1968’. The ability to break the process of making art into a set of descriptive instructions (the network of potentials that conventions produce) is a prerequisite to being able to produce art-making machines. By focusing on the decision-making aspects of human agency in determining the final artwork rather than the active, physically engaged dimension of art creation, it becomes possible to consider the distinctions between these two activities and the ways they combine to literally inscribe aesthetic con- cerns and beliefs about the nature of the work in the construction of machineries for making art. This framework recognizes the artist’s role as the designer of art, rather than as necessarily the fabricator of those works. Understanding the creation of art in these terms extends the recognition that skilled labourers employed by an artist (in the form or technicians or assistants) in making art can be applied and understood as in the use of automated technology as well.

References Alberro, Alexander (2000), ‘Reconsidering Conceptual Art’, in Alberro, A. and

Stimson, B. (eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Betancourt, Michael (ed.) (2004), Visual Music Instrument Patents, Vol. 1, Holicong: Borgo Press.

——, (ed.) (2005), Mary Hallock-Greenewalt: The Complete Patents, Wildside Press.

Danto, Arthur (1990), Beyond the Brillo Box, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Eco, Umberto (1984), Postscript to The Name of the Rose, (trans. William Weaver), New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Greenberg, Clement (1986), The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hallock-Greenewalt, Mary (1946), Nourathar: The Fine Art of Light-Color Playing, Philadelphia: Westbrook Publishing.

LeWitt, Sol (1972), ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art, 1968’ in Art-Language, 1:1, 1969, reprinted in Meyer, U. (ed), Conceptual Art ed. Ursula Meyer, New York: Dutton.

Lippard, Lucy (1997), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, Berkeley: The University of California Press.

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Ono, Yoko (1995), Instruction Paintings, New York: Weatherhill.

Poggioli, Renato (1968), The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Pold, Soren (2005), ‘Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form’ in Post Modern Culture, 15:1, par. 6., www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/15.2pold.html.

Preston, Stuart (1965), ‘Reputations Made and in the Making’, in The New York Times, 18 April.

Rothkoff, Scott (2001), Roxy Paine, New York: James Cohan Gallery.

Suggested citation Betancourt, M. (2008), ‘Intellectual process, visceral result: human agency and the

production of artworks via automated technology’, Journal of Visual Arts Practice 7: 1, pp. 11–18, doi: 10.1386/jvap.7.1.11/1.

Contributor details Michael Betancourt is an independent scholar, curator and new media/installation artist who writes critical theory. His papers have appeared in Leonardo, CTheory, The Millenium Film Journal and Semiotica, and he has edited several anthologies on visual music technology and art, as well as having written the book Structuring Time, a theory of motion pictures based on the historical avant-garde.

Contact: 1718 Summit Street, Sioux City IA 51105, 712-252-9595. E-mail: cinegraphic@gmail.com

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