In Collaboration with Machines

In Collaboration with Machines Art is Science is we. -Claude Bernard (1813-18’78) We enlist the simulated intelligence of technology in the making of art. It is a natural collaboration to most of us, we who share a world with digital dopplegangers, autonomous agents and robots. It may be natural, but there is a leap here from the use of technology to carry out the express intention of the artist to technology that collaborates with that intention. Prior to digital (computer) technology , the implements of art may have constrained creation, but they did not decide it. That is, printing presses, ink, chisel and marble, the range and tone of musical instruments-all these determined a universe of possibilities for the artist, but did not choose among the possibilities. Computers can and do choose-within the constraints imposed by humans. The roles are reversed. I do not mean to exaggerate: humans often reserve the right to throw away the computers ’ product, and so impose their aestheticjudgment. If the artist does not impose thatjudgment, then producers, publishers and curators will. But the fact remains: software produces luscious music and poetry. Brian Eno has software perform for him as he “writes”his own music-and he told an audience last year that the computer’s music can be as good as his “own.”The simplest use of a computer to make pictures implicates the collaboration of the machines. The apparent serendipity of line, color and texture, the sight of multiple layers of transparent and opaque colors, are provided by the computer ; software can even create a work in the style of Matisse, Monet or van Gogh. embodied so to speak in the exquisite exhibitions of SurvivalResearch Laboratories (SRL).SRL makes enormous machines from the flotsam andjetsam of a machine world: V2 engines, trucks, flame throwers, wheels, buzz saws and farm equipment are smelted together to form enormous, apparently autonomous robots that move and attack to the literally deafening screams of explosions and machine noise and the incineration of flame and gasoline. The machines move with inchoate menace, threatening the humans who stand by in awe, shredding the theater and eventually each other. It is ajoke, of course-it is theater, after all. Humans dressed in discreet black have some control via radio signals, but it can get out of hand, and SlU’s founder lost part of his body to one of the machines. It is the best kind ofjoke, the kind that sometimes is not. SRL’swork is a puissant metaphor for the autonomous machine. But both those machines and their software cousins reach back through their media-through the software and pieces of erstwhile metal-to collaborate with makers from the past. Someone (probably many people) wrote the software; someone operated it; someone decided to use it; someone combined it with other programs. These software collages may now be ordinary, but they are bar sinister in the eyes of the law. Copyright law needs an author, a maker, a creator, an utterly human being who can own things, make money, hire lawyers and sue people. The ideal here is the embodied genius of one person-the poet with pen, the painter with brush. Reward the author with rights, the theory is, and more art will be made. Without an artist to Computers, machines and automation are the metal heart of much performance art, Q 1997ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 30,No. 4,pp. 247-248, 1997 247 own the work, copyright law flounders. To be sure, there is the notion of a ‘tjoint work,” but that requires the deliberate contributions of multiple human authors toward an intended joint work. Can a program intend? Can the author of a program intend the unpredictable output of the software to be a contribution to a future work with other unknown humans? Not likely. But at least in these current scenarios humans , only, are critically involved in the collage of creation. They can, if necessary, be left to the dubious pleasures of litigation to sort out their legal rights. And if that sounds unappetizing, the humans can make contracts to state their rights. audience in the digital realm and the advent of art as an electronic...