SP0001, the first swarm painting. January 2, 2002, 10.45 a.m. Drawing automaton, Jaquet-Droz family. Chimpanzee at work. Child painting (Tomás, 5 months).

Leonel Moura page 2 Swarm Paintings Non-human art -> This first painting was a true revelation. Facing the naive scrabbles from the swarm, I felt to be in the presence of a conceptual shift. Those kind of things that creates a before and an after. The excitement changed into a vision. The following step, very laborious and complicated, was to try to limit to the maximum the human intervention. Not only to bind the swarm directly with the painting machine, but also to increase autonomy at the level of the bottom-up methodological design. (As a natural step I am now working with robotics) The paintings and drawings reproduced here are the result of this ‘primitive’ work. The colors and the formats are still my ‘interpretations’. Actually in this first stage all the works from the artificial swarm are human assisted. But they will be less and less as the autonomy improves. Anyway, it can already be stated that these 'paintings' have very few human characteristics. They do not share practically any of the conditions of (human) authorship. They do not refer to a pre-committed representation, don't assume any sentimental pretension or express a particular sensibility, and moreover they don’t expect an esthetical or ethical recognition. They also don’t affirm taste, style or any message. They are a form of automatism at its most radical manifestation. The similarities with recognized art works are due to the production context. That is, they are defects and not qualities, inevitable at this experimental phase where my intervention is still considerable. The more I will withdraw from it, the bigger the autonomy will grow. Tomorrow we will be able to ‘give birth’ to an artificial life entirely dedicated to its ‘art’. The use of current artistic categories, such as drawings, paintings, sculptures, is not relevant to the process, but is justified by the need of a strategy of recognition for the art world, without which it would not be possible to introduce the questions that really matter. The desire to gain autonomy is not new in art history. Three moments, corresponding to important aesthetical ruptures, are of particular importance. The use by Renaissance painters of the ‘Camara Obscura’; the ‘invention’ of the abstraction in the beginning of XX century; and, a little later, the appearance of the ‘ready-made’ by Duchamp. The ‘Camara Obscura’ was not the first ‘machine’ to help artists, but it embodies a fundamental moment, when in a conscientious and objective way an instrument of mediation between the model and its representation was adopted. By that it was possible to depreciate the subjective aspects of craftsmanship, allowing a concentration on the content. The invention of the ‘Camara Lucida’ and later the photography has contributed decisively to radicalize the process. For example, Vermeer paintings would not be possible without the use of a ‘Camara Obscura’. They look like Polaroid's, because they are in fact human assisted photographic ‘snapshots’. If the ‘Camara Obscura’ helped to concentrate on representation, the abstraction finally freed the artist from it. The art didn’t need anymore to represent a portion of the reality, it become a reality on its own. The subject of art becomes art itself. With Duchamp and his ‘ready-made’ it was the statute of the work of art to be questioned. It didn’t matter anymore the esthetical achievement, nor the skill of the author. The spectator and the context made the art. All the art after Duchamp is a context art, varying only in modalities of contextualization, decontextualization, recontextualization and so on. At a first glance we can see these paintings as one particular way of output, to be considered in the same plane of an image in the monitor, a print, a digital photography or a video. However the essence of these paintings is not the image, but the process. Its implications have little to do with the step from virtual to real, even if that is important in itself, but with the consequences that this ‘new art’ will have in culture and society. -> Camara Obscura, 1544. [Home] [page 1] [page 2] [page 3] [page 4]