Remix
The Large Hadron Collider Is Not a Pipe. It Is a Way of Thinking: On Collaborating with Machines.
Kathrin Passig
Kathrin Passig’s talk discusses whether artistic creation can be delegated to a machine or software program. She illustrates this with her random T-shirt project, Zufallsshirt. This consists primarily of a program that randomly enters modules from a set of texts into predefined graphic sequences. The customer cannot influence the design, apart from rejecting the proposed T-shirt and asking for another one to be played out, and nor can the programmer. The distinctive factor in this project is that the design of the T-shirts is left almost entirely to the random generator in the software, and the only thing left to the individual, or customer, is the final choice. This raises questions about whether Zufallsshirt is an example of the abolition of the author. Kathrin Passig refutes this objection during her talk, firstly because the generator can only select from the predefined pool of typefaces, text modules, graphics, and templates, and secondly because the playful aspect is seen as important by the user. Zufallsshirt users enjoy rejecting and generating T-shirts with texts that are often amusingly absurd. In other words, apart from the artistic intentions of designers and the market-oriented production, a role is played by the interactive, playful approach of consumers.
Towards the end, Passig cites other examples of computational creativity, such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s poetry automaton, which also works with text modules, and the Turing test by deepart.io, which appears to blur the distinction between a painting by a human being and a photograph taken with a filter. While Kathrin Passig argues that machines are far removed from replacing artistic individuals, we would be unable to recognize automated art as such were it not for certain conventions in our reception of art. The speaker concludes that the relationship between art and everyday practice or art and technology must be continually renegotiated.