Is it Art yet?

Is it Art yet?

Nick Flynn vs The Voice Scroll

By Natalie Klym, Program Curator, U of T BMO Lab | VP Market Development, Radium.

The Nick Flynn vs The Scroll project is part of a program I launched at the University of Toronto’s BMO Lab 3 years ago called AI as Foil. Originally a series of Conversations between artists and AI technologists, it now includes a Residency component supported by Radium. The new format puts AI technologies developed by the Lab directly in the hands of traditional artists — those who have not considered or had the opportunity to use AI, and may even reject or oppose its application to artistic pursuits.?

Our inaugural artist-in-resident is Nick Flynn, award-winning American poet and professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. In collaboration with BMO Lab director, David Rokeby, Nick has been engaging with Voice Scroll, an AI that translates spoken voice into panoramic images in real-time. It is used to create live interactive performances. Voice Scroll is making its debut at NeurIPs 2023 as part of the new Creative AI track.

The AI as Foil program was my response to concerns raised by artists (as well as my own) about the impact of AI on creativity. While a lot of digital or electronic artists are excited by the creative possibilities of AI, many traditional artists were having, and continue to have, strong reactions against it, mostly on grounds that it lacks heart and soul, the premise being that A) these are immutable, unique, and essential human qualities that distinguish us from machines and B) they must be protected. (Disclaimer: I am temporarily putting aside the more recent concerns around job-losses and mass-scale IP theft following the explosion of generative AI in the past year.)

My gut reaction is still very much in line with that thinking. However, I realize that these reactions are not only based on a specific, pre-AI, set of aesthetic values and expectations, they are also based on what are relatively early experiments; experiments that tend to reflect the business goals driving much of AI innovation, like process efficiency. Or, at the opposite extreme, these experiments can appear playful if not gimmicky in that they showcase the more spectacular aspects of the new techniques without necessarily constituting authentic or sophisticated works of art — yet.?

Using a new technology to automate or augment an existing practice is not a particularly creative or artistic goal, nor is displaying a palette of new capabilities for their own sake. But these are the typical, and arguably necessary, first steps in the process of innovation.?

My favorite examples of this phenomena come from the music industry. The synthesizer and the electric guitar are great examples of utilitarian technologies that were transformed into creative tools by pioneering recording artists who took them beyond their original goals of automation and amplification. And not without a fight; the results were vehemently rejected by many fans and other artists at first, and later became the standards against which that generation now evaluates AI’s role in the creative process.

The other not-so-intuitive aspect of this process is that it’s not just the art itself that is transformed. Rather, the ultimate object of change is the entire system in which creative works are made, consumed and understood, not to mention the experience of being human. I would also add here that, especially in the last couple of decades, the very process of innovation has been deeply transformed.

Sometimes technology innovation occurs in incremental steps. Other times, it crosses or marks a threshold, and represents the basis of an entirely new trajectory or paradigm, with new practices and new interpretative frameworks that evolve over time, through use. These add up to new ways of being, of thinking, perceiving, expressing, creating. In the case of AI, we are entering a cyborg culture, although theorists like Donna Haraway astutely claim that we have long been cyborgs by virtue of the fact that the bulk of society is (or strives to be) fully integrated with personal computing devices and the Internet.

Whether incremental or revolutionary, resistance is a natural part of this process, until the technology is legitimized, accepted, and eventually taken for granted and defended when the next threshold is reached. There is always some loss of humanity, but the nature and extent of that loss depends on how we define humanity. And that’s where things get tricky. Artists are in constant dialogue with technology, both informing and changing the other. With each innovation, our relationship with technology deepens, and that process changes our experience and definition of being human.?

If I was to put forth a thesis, I would say that the issue is not so much the “loss” of the old as it is the inability to absorb the new — organically and democratically. And this is the result of the frenzied pace and scale of technology change — not to mention the complete lack of control — which leaves artists alienated from their new tools, and fragments the mind and the creative process. The solution to this alienation and fragmentation is not so much to reject the new tools, it is to enable artists to absorb them in a meaningful way and understand the shifts. That takes both time and design. Perhaps what we need to protect is a more organic and democratic process of innovation.

The Nick Flynn vs The Voice Scroll project is the first experiment we are conducting within this framing. It is intended to take us beyond automation and gimmick to discover new sites and forms of creativity as well as new systems of knowledge and ways of being that derive from the unique properties of AI-based tools and their applications, while at the same time discovering and defining those new properties.?

In the process, and as suggested by the name of this program, AI as Foil, we hope to gain insight into the boundaries of the current paradigm. It is only in crossing a threshold that we demarcate the de facto previous paradigm and gain clarity on its nature. To mis-quote the German philosopher Kierkegaard: “Life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards.” Or, maybe more appropriately, to quote singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

On a more fundamental level, the AI as Foil program seeks to explore the basic relationship between art and technology, not just in terms of how technology influences art, but how artists influence the development and uses of their tools and associated processes. The experiments carried out at the Lab offer an opportunity for traditional artists to define and direct the nature of “Creative AI” and AI more broadly in collaboration with technologists.?

As we enter the era of AI adoption and regulation, artists must be part of the dialogue, but they need to arm themselves with knowledge and experience. And likewise, as technologists rush forward into their creative AI initiatives, they must do so with an awareness of what they may be destroying, or leaving behind.

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