1) Machines can make art
2) Man and machine can make symbiotic art
3) Symbiotic art is a new paradigm that opens up new ways for art
4) It involves totally relinquishing manufacture and the reign of the hand in art
5) It involves totally relinquishing personal expression and the centrality of the artist/human
6) It involves totally relinquishing any moralist or spiritual ambition, or any purpose of representation
[Making the Artists that make the Art]
Art as we know it is dead. This time it is definite and official.
Often declared during the last century though never actually achieved, the death of art is now a fact. Not just out of a mere wish or avant-garde rhetoric, but because the conditions for artistic production have changed brusquely. Suddenly, all modern art has become ancient art. Because the idea of art as a product exclusively of human creativity has been finally abandoned, to adopt the notion that it is the direct output of non-human artists.
As usual, such a change of paradigm has only been possible through technological evolution. From the analysis of the parts, we move on to the mechanics of complexity. By studying living organisms we are now in a position to realize life as it could be.
When robots ceased to merely simulate human behavior, such as walking, playing football, or cracking jokes, to start being used to make art, something very radical happened. Robots that make art are not only questioning the idea of art or philosophy, they even cast doubts on our own condition as human beings. Why bother continuing to do something that machines can do better and more consistently? If art has no purpose, as all the modern and post-modern theories declare, then machines are the best creators.
Once having freed ourselves from making art we may now devote our efforts to generate a new type of artist born from the broth of protobiotics, robotics, and artificial life. We can build the machines that will make art. This new artist/machine has no predetermined objective, nor aesthetics, morals, or intent. He realizes the last of the “pure psychic automatism” as announced by Breton and partly developed by Pollock.
Besides, there is no concern about individualism or identity. The action is collective and the World is apprehended as a common territory emerging from a stigmergic behavior.
From a philosophical standpoint the action is relational and the works that are generated are synthetic proposals issuing from the unraveling of collective experimentation. The life of the artist/machine is interlinked to the life of the artist/human.
When we cease to make art to start making artists, what do we become ourselves? We become symbiotic artists! Humans are no longer concerned about the direct production of objects but dedicate all their knowledge and energy to create and cooperate with an imaginary, non-human life that is devoted to art-making.
In doing so, the symbiotic artist asserts that technology serves creativity and not the destructive military industry or mercantilism.
The role of the symbiotic artist from now on is to create nonhuman artists and to cooperate with them to produce art. This entails understanding the rudiments of non-anthropocentric life and creating the conditions for experimentation to take place. In other words, art as it could be.
Art of the 21st Century.
Written in 2002 and published in 2003 by Leonel Moura and Henrique Garcia Pereira