About a year ago, The New York Times explored the dilemma facing curators at major arts organizations regarding artificial intelligence. The piece was headlined “Amid the A.I. Deluge, What Counts as Art? Ask the Curators.” (Here’s a gift link). The gist:
With the rise of artificial intelligence, machines are increasingly engaged in the creative process, raising the question: What is art if the human hand is no longer involved? It can be baffling for viewers in an age when A.I.-generated text and imagery already permeate the culture.
In response, major art museums are wrestling with what, within the kaleidoscope, counts as art, and are trying to teach the public to see beyond spectacle. In so doing, they are creating a canon that artists, collectors and audiences will treat as a guide to what matters and why.
Curators argue A.I. art is less about aesthetics—some of it is, in a word, ugly—than about intent and process.
“The technology is not the art,” said Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at MoMA and director of the museum’s research and development. “In the end, it’s about the person’s creativity and vision.”
Thirty-two years ago, the art world was similarly struggling with the incorporation of computers into art. This debate reached the University of Nevada, Reno, in a big way when the art department replaced a retired ceramics professor with Joseph DeLappe—who, as Nevada Weekly staff writer Brad Summerhill put it, was “one of the country’s foremost computer artists.”
Brad’s piece, headlined “Artitude: When art and cyberworld collide,” also included what I believe is one of the first website addresses ever to be in the Nevada Weekly/Reno News & Review. (Unsurprisingly, the link doesn’t work anymore.) Here’s the story, from the Oct. 12, 1994, edition of the Nevada Weekly, in its entirety:
Hard drive. Mouse pad. Floppy disk.
It would have taken a far-sighted art critic two decades ago to realize that those terms would become as familiar to many artists as canvas, palette, and brush.
But that is what has happened with the advent of the computer age.
Artists are venturing into a new realm of mixed-media creativity, and some critics and academics are having to be dragged into acceptance of this new craft.
While contemporary technology has puzzled some traditional artists and has caused others to turn their noses up at progress as a whole, the fact remains that computers have become like a paint brush to numerous artists skilled in New Age technology.
Undaunted by skeptics wary of those who use computers as their canvas, the University of Nevada, Reno, has hired one of the country’s foremost computer artists in an effort to help the school ride the crest of this new wave.
Photographer and digital artist Joseph DeLappe, 31, was recently recruited from Florida to help UNR fulfill its commitment to digital and mixed media.
A native of San Francisco, DeLappe received a 1993 National Endowment for the Arts photography fellowship through the Southern Arts Federation and recently had a solo exhibition of his mixed media and digital artwork and photography at UNR’s Sheppard Gallery.
He takes the place on the faculty of a traditional artist, a professor of ceramics.
“All art was at some point made with technology,” says DeLappe, responding to the criticism that computers cannot be involved in the creation of “real art.”
“At one point, a stick with bristles on it was an advanced tool,” he says. “As an artist, it’s important to communicate with whatever tools are at hand.”
The current controversy is not unlike the brouhaha that developed in 1839, when the invention of photography changed the art world in a flash.
The advent of photography literally reshaped traditional forms of art. Some painters, for example, began drawing characters partially off-frame, similar to the action photography that was coming to the attention of the art-viewing public.
DeLappe utilizes computers in shaping an intriguing mixture of images that are then sometimes applied to other mediums, including such debris from contemporary culture as fried chicken buckets.
Most of his artwork focuses on his personal memory and family history. Some of it is highlighted by a series of digitally manipulated photographs, entitled Legacies, that incorporate images of his grandparents, in their naive Hungary, with contemporary portraits or his immediate family, including his daughters and himself.
One of the works, “Image to Connect With the Dead,” has as a centerpiece DeLappe’s grandfather. In one corner is his grandparents’ wedding photo. The artist can be seen at the lower left corner. (The resemblance between the two men is readily apparent.) Other family portraits are faded in the background. The effect is somewhat eerie, and the generational connections, portrayed as they are, give meaning to the artwork.
DeLappe’s “Little Eva Carry On” is similarly poignant. The face of one of DeLappe’s two twin daughters is surrounded by family images. This work came about as a result of the suicide of DeLappe’s grandmother, a Jew who survived the terror of Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe.
Printed on the photo is a line from the woman’s suicide note: “Little Eva carry on…” The combination of photos and typescript in DeLappe’s Legacies series is wrenching.
DeLappe uses technology to create his art-work, but this technology does not dominate the content of his material—it only makes his art possible.
DeLappe’s recent exhibition on campus also featured mixed media pieces that focused on political and social topics.
His mixed media sculpture (for lack of a better term), entitled “Gulf War Memories,” was inspired by an article DeLappe read saying that fast-food sales were up during the Gulf War, apparently because people didn’t want to have to cook dinner and miss the war on TV.
DeLappe’s piece involves all the senses. Colorful images reminiscent of the war taken from television are scaled up the center of the piece. Small fans are attached to the sides of the pictures. In front of the fans, gnawed chicken legs dangle, and at the base of the centerpiece an empty bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken rests. When this work was new, the smell of fried chicken blew at the spectator. Now the smell is gone, but the impact of the piece remains. It’s whimsical and amusing, but it is at the same time an accurate portrayal of a war that came vividly into American living rooms each night on CNN in bright, bold images.
Another mixed media piece, “See, Touch, Believe,” incorporates the four elements with digital and video technology. Three large fans are suspended in the corner of a dark room, blowing air to the ceiling. White beach balls bounce above the fans, with video representations of the other three elements projected onto the balls as background—fire, earth, water. A small square is projected into the middle of the background image. In the squares, the words “see,” “touch,” and “believe” appear—one on each balloon, while various flashing images light up inside the squares—the color red, part of a man’s face. The balloons waver and bounce wildly above the fans with these rotating images. DeLappe creates a virtual facsimile of the physical elements. Much of his artwork concerns itself with the manufacturing of a representation of the thing, as opposed to displaying the thing itself.
“Tree,” for example, is not a tree, but an artificial representation of one, a combined sculpture and video image. DeLappe plays off of the ideas of theoreticians who have commented on the aspects of “hyperreality” in modern culture.
The highest praise, perhaps, of DeLappe’s work is that it is not gaudy (no Disneyland sort of hyperreality) but tasteful. There is always the danger with any kind of art, and especially with art utilizing advanced technologies, that the medium used by the artist will dominate the artwork.
DeLappe himself sees the paradox of utilizing technology to comment on culture.
“There’s as much opposition to it as there was to photography,” he says. “The potential for this is not yet realized.”
Watching television, DeLappe notes, is a passive activity, and art has to be active. The forthcoming generation of artists are growing up in a time when attention spans are decreasing, he says, yet the young students who come of age in the video culture will be best able to utilize these technologies to the fullest extent.
On the wall of one of UNR’s computer labs, the usenet worldwide computer web is illustrated. The Western world, especially America, is black with lines. It’s a vivid portrayal of the so-called American cultural imperialism that is sweeping throughout the world. It’s a one-way street, DeLappe notes. Our culture spreads, but many native cultures around the world have no means of sending back information.
“I’m really concerned about in what forms (the students) will be able to put their work out,” he says. DeLappe drills his students on art history. And he pushes his students to “do something interesting” and “not just play around.”
DeLappe’s work is featured on an international computer web (similar to gopher) called “FineArts OnLine,” which is accessible at this address: http://www.msstate.edu/Fineart_Online/home.html. Six artists are featured, and the program is expanding.
“It’s the most extensive publication of my work,” says DeLappe. “I’m not particularly concerned with selling my art. The implications (of computer access to fine art) are probably scary to gallery owners.”
No one can say for sure how the world of fine art will change as a result of computer networking in the information age. But DeLappe feels that some of the opposition to digital art will begin to disappear once the public becomes exposed to it. “The term ‘button-pushers’ is bandied about (the university),” DeLappe says with a smile.
In the future, art spectators may well be able to download works from their favorite artists on their home computers. Perhaps these images will be projected onto blank walls. DeLappe says he saw in a television interview that Microsoft exec Bill Gates has projected pictures of famous masterworks on his walls rotating every half hour.
“The potential for this, once everyone gets access, “ he says, “is quite intriguing.”
Now, at a time when the majority of the art world has embraced the camera as a legitimate vehicle to convey human emotion, artists (and critics) have been confronted with a new and more baffling tool—the computer.
DeLappe’s unconventional methods, however, have been embraced at the department where he works.
“We’re still a very traditional art department,” says Ed Martinez, chairman of UNR’s art department. “But that doesn’t mean you turn your back on technology.”
Martinez, who teaches printmaking and drawing, recalls that there was a struggle over technology in his field years ago.
“In the ‘60s, we went through a fine arts problem with printmaking incorporating photography,” says Martinez. “New methods were available commercially, but the fine arts community took a long time to embrace them.”
The world of digital art faces the same opposition now. DeLappe came on as an assistant professor in the art department. It’s a tenure-track position. which became available when Chris Undersayer, a professor who had taught ceramics, retired two years ago.
“Some people from the public, such a school teachers, didn’t want ceramic to lose out,” says Martinez. “There were some people who felt that the 3-D areas were losing out to the 2-D areas.”
The fear expressed by some faculty at UNR was that ceramics was being abandoned to a non-tenured position. But Martinez says that there are still three ceramics classes taught now. There were four previously.
“You can evaluate what’s going on by products on the walls,” says Martinez, adding that the addition of DeLappe to the faculty has had a positive impact on art instruction. “We’re now getting some people into classes who aren’t art majors.”
Martinez says the applications of digital media are wide-ranging. The kinds of computer technologies now being incorporated into the art department curriculum are just as relevant to architecture, theater, and engineering as they are to the fine arts, he says.
“You don let the tool dominate you, and it will have a positive impact on students and artists,” he says.
But Martinez does foresee that keeping up with computer technology could represent a heavy financial burden in future years. He offers the idea of leasing equipment as a possible solution.
“You have to keep up,” he says. “I think it’s a great start.”
DeLappe remained at UNR for 23 years before, in 2017, moving to Dundee, Scotland, to become a professor of games and tactical media at Abertay University.
He continues to create art with new technologies. He recently updated a 1984 work of his, called “The Computerized Confessional”—which is a chatbot that will take your Catholic-style confession. He says on his website: “It was intended then, and now, as a critique of emerging ideas and practices involving so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence.'” Check it out here.
—Jimmy Boegle
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