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Latent Spaces: What AI Art Can Tell Us About Aesthetic Experience
No full textIn her book L’art victime de l’estétique, Carole Talon-Hugon criticizes the identification that has been made between art and aesthetics since the Eighteenth century. In this context, what the author calls “aesthetics” or “aesthetic experience” is essentially linked to the sphere of sensitivity, which becomes more and more isolated from that of good and truth. Art – this is the author’s thesis – progressively loses its link to good and truth as it becomes something that must just affect the senses. In this context, the author recalls that a central role was played by the growing importance of colour, in a process that led from Impressionism to abstract art. Throughout this evolution, according to Talon-Hugon, the intention of painting increasingly became an attempt to restitute “the purely visible impression,” isolated from any judgement or identification. In this paper, this thesis will be confronted with a new type of art, the art made through artificial intelligence. In particular, the focus will be on some artworks made through a kind of AI called GANs (generative adversarial networks). If one considers these pictures, one may notice that they share with some early Twentieth century paintings the fact that colour becomes somewhat independent from the outlines and drawing. Outlines are very blurred and the identities of the objects are not certain. Nevertheless, this type of colour in GANs pictures doesn’t demonstrate a denial of the task of identifying things. On the contrary, it is precisely concerned with the machine’s very attempt to classify objects. Moreover, even if we recognize in the AI our own attempts to classify and comprehend the world (the Ai as an “uncanny mirror” of ourselves), the AI remains nevertheless something other than ourselves. Therefore, the aesthetic pleasure when faced with these pictures implies the expectation not only of a possible knowledge, but also of a new relationship with an other. This will allow some considerations on the very notion of aesthetics itself
«To call fools into a circle»: Benjamin’s interpretation of As you like it and The Tempest
Get PDFCalderon and Shakespeare are the two main authors that lie behind Benjamin’s examination of the German baroque drama. This paper addresses the importance of Shakespeare in his difference from the other big European cousin, Calderon. This does not mean that, according to Benjamin, Shakespeare is more important than Calderon (his beautiful essay on Calderon of 1923 contradicts this point), but rather that the English author brings to light an element that in Calderon is in some way missing. This is what Benjamin in some critical texts from the period of the Trauerpielbuch calls the «dramatic».
Why does Benjamin say here that the dramatic precedes the tragic? And what does this have to do with the two Shakespearian characters he refers to in a letter of the same year, Caliban and Ariel? Moreover, is the interpretation of The Tempest that this passage implies the same as the one that he suggested in his previous essay on As you like it (1918)?
These questions will lead to a few passages of the Trauerspielbuch that were particularly difficult to translate (not only in the two Italian previous translations, but also in the first English version, by John Osborne) and that can shed light on some important aspects of the book itself. In this context, another Shakespearian character will come to the aid, the Jacques of As you like it, with his Greek invocation «to call fools into a circle»
Who inspires who? : Aesthetics in front of AI art
No full textAI art certainly belongs among the most under-researched art forms of today. While the ethical aspects of AI are often discussed, its implications for aesthetics are rarely considered. The reason is perhaps that the ability of AI to produce art is a very recent development. Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more important nowadays due to the many changes it has made in our lives. In this context, one of the most surprising fields in which AI has suddenly progressed in the last few years concerns the very human (until now) capacity for artistic (and in a more general sense, aesthetic) expression. However, the general public still tends to confuse AI art with the more general category of digital art, and what AI really does in the artistic field is scarcely known. AI art is not only computer assisted but computer generated. In AI art there is at least one part of the artistic process that is left to the machine. The artist gives the AI some data and has to wait, in order to see how the AI will elaborate upon them. AI, therefore, becomes not just a tool for artists, but also something different, the nature of which needs to be explored. What does AI art have to say about our way of seeing art, and perhaps about our way of seeing the world in general? This will be the leading question of this paper, which will be addressed through the analysis of some relevant aspects of this new kind of art
Freedom to the Spirits. Walter Benjamin reads «The Tempest» (and «The Master of Ballantrae»)
No full textThis article focuses on a little studied aspect of Benjamin’s thinking in the period in which
he wrote his Trauerspielbuch: his reading of The Tempest. Benjamin had for a long time intended
to write a commentary on The Tempest, which could provide the answer, he believed, to
some very important questions. The starting point will be a comparison Benjamin makes
in a letter between Sigismund, the unfortunate protagonist of Hofmannsthal’s drama Der
Turm, locked inside the tower since he was born, and the strange servants of the magician
Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Caliban, Ariel, the half animal-half man, or the
primal spirit of any kind”. It then looks at the fundamental difference Benjamin highlights
between Calderon – from whose Life Is a Dream Hofmannsthal’s drama is taken – and
Shakespeare. While Calderon’s image is – Benjamin wrote in another letter – an “intensification
of speech itself ”, Shakespeare’s image is “similitude and figure of action and
man”. The political value of this difference will be investigated through another work
that will have a great importance for Benjamin a few years later, The Master of Ballantrae.
What is the fundamental “meaning” that Benjamin finds in this book
It’s Not Easy Being Green. The Challenge of Colour
No full textThis essay addresses the question of the relationship between “work” and “object”
from a particular point of view: the problem of color, as part of the “object”
that constitutes a picture. In doing so, it aims to build a bridge between “analytical”
and “continental” philosophy in relation to the question of color and, possibly, to
make some remarks on the idea of “object”, as it is formulated by Peter Lamarque.
The discussion will be divided in three parts:
I. The first part will give a short sketch of the debate on the concept of color
that arose in the Anglo-American philosophy since the end of the 1980s until today,
with a particular focus on the position called “naïve realism”.
II. The second part will consider the question of color in painting through the
works of two contemporary artists, not so well-known yet but chosen here for their
way of using color to deal with some issues of today, in particular the tension between
city and nature.
III. The conclusion of the paper will consider a few problems that color raises
to the idea of “object”, as it is articulated by Lamarque
Una “strana prospettiva”: un percorso nella AI art
Get PDFSono passati ormai alcuni anni da quando per la prima volta un’opera realizzata con l’intelligenza artificiale (IA) è stata venduta sul mercato “ufficiale” dell’arte, da Christie’s nel 2018 (2). Da allora sono successe molte cose: sono emersi nuovi tipi di IA, che hanno permesso nuovi esperimenti artistici. Resta, tuttavia, un interrogativo filosofico, che riguarda l’ancora “strana” presenza che la IA rappresenta nell’ambito artistico e anche al di fuori di esso. Come va inteso il suo ruolo, e quali possibilità dischiude all’artista e al suo pubblico? Si proverà qui a rispondere esaminando tre opere, a cui corrisponderanno altrettante ipotesi
Portraits of non-existent People: AI art and (human) imagination
Get PDFThe essay will address a series of portraits in which the portrayed person is non-existent. Such is the case of a number of works made through artificial intelligence (AI).
In this type of art, the machine becomes capable of elaborating on the given data in its own way, with a degree of autonomy that exceeds the human artist’s control. In the case of portraits, the AI is trained on a series of pre-existing pictures (belonging, for example, to the history of art) and becomes capable, therefore, of generating a series of new pictures, which are similar to, but also different from, the original ones: portraits of non-existent people. This case will be compared to another group of portraits Bence Nanay calls “Portraits
of People not Present”. In a paper that bears the latter title, Nanay analyzes a series of modernist portraits, in which the portrayed person is absent from the picture. This seems a contradiction because a portrait should include a representation of the person who is actually standing in front of the artist. The viewer can, however, recognize these pictures as real portraits, because mental imagery intervenes – so says Nanay – and fills the gap between what is present and what is absent. It is this idea of mental imagery that will help us demonstrate that AI art can stimulate human imagination in a new and interesting way (this will be the paper’s first objective). In fact, one of Nanay’s most important ideas seems to be that imagination plays a relevant role not only in the context of fiction but also in our everyday perception of the world. The first hypothesis of the paper will be that AI art, through
the errors and deformations of the machine, exposes our own errors and deformations in the perception of the world. AI art, therefore, brings to light the role played
by imagination in our own perception of reality: the fact that we always transform what we see and we can always see it in other ways. The second objective of the paper will be to address, in greater detail, Nanay’s idea of mental imagery. In fact, Nanay distinguishes between imagination and mental imagery. Mental imagery is different from propositional imagination because it can be voluntary but also involuntary and it is usually pre-verbal. But is verbal language really excluded from mental imagery? Or are there aspects of language that can enter this dimension? In this last case, it could be that the relationship between propositional imagination and mental imagery is not so much that of a separation, but rather a continuum between the two. This last problem will be explored through the consideration of another work of art made using AI, Klingemann’s Appropriate response. In the world of AI, as Klingemann explains, pictures and words are not two heterogeneous entities, because they are both made of pixels. What about human imagination
Unbewaffnetes Auge : Benjamin’s interpretation of comedy in Shakespeare and Molière
Get PDFThis essay examines two texts that Walter Benjamin wrote in 1918, during
his period in Bern, on Shakespeare’s comedy As you like it and on Le malade imaginaire
by Molière. When these texts are considered together, a question arises. What is
the role of the comic inside Benjamin’s philosophy, in this period and also in the years
to follow? Is the comic really only the other side of mourning, as Benjamin writes in
The Origin of German Tragic Drama, or does it also have another significance, a significance
of its own? Moreover, why should Shakespeare’s comedy be the opposite of
Molière’s comedy, as Benjamin writes in the paper on Molière?
In order to answer, we are going to set a connection between Shakespeare’s «unarmed
eye» (As you like it) and the «innocence» (Fate and Character) that Molière’s comedy
indicates. This will also lead us to another text that was of much significance to Benjamin
(GB, 02/02/1920 et al.), Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. Here too, as in As you
like it, there is an innocent protagonist trying to escape from the evil of a court. Yet
Shakespeare’s As you like it ends with the reconstruction of a court. What does Benjamin
mean, then, when he states that in As you like it «everything ends in loneliness»?
The answer will provide a point of convergence between Shakespeare’s and Molière’s
comedy. Benjamin’s idea of «Weltlichkeit» (ibid.), of which comedy is a necessary part,
will prove to be an alternative to the “armed” character of the court
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