11: Timeline Ch 8—Tooling Era (2000s) with Christiane Paul, Casey Reas, Christa Sommerer & Golan Levin

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody, and welcome to this Lerandum discussion following the release of chapter 8 of our Generative Art Timeline. And that was covering the decade of the 2000s. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, or monk Antony, the editor and chief at Lerandum. And joining us today are the artists and the thinkers and the writers who lived art history in the decade of the 2000s. And they include Christa Ampoule, Kisuris, Christa Summer, and Goa 11. And then also joining us from the Lerandum team are our co-founder, the funny guys, and our collection lead, Conrad House or Nemo Cake. And today we're looking at digital expression in the 2000s. And we're zooming in on this particular decade because at Lerandum, I've been writing this Generative Art Timeline and very thankful to Conrad who's been helping out with adding images. And this timeline goes back 70,000 years into pre-modern history in the first chapter. And we've had talks for each chapter so far and two for the 60s. And this is our talk for the eighth chapters. So while we are getting close to the finish, and the eighth chapter covers the decade of the 2000s. And I keep calling it that because I'm not sure if there's another way that you refer to this decade, Ops or Nots. So please refer to it however you'd like. And really we want these discussions to be opportunities to learn from the past and to speak to the people and the artists who were making the history that we're celebrating and learning about today. So without further ado, those people are. Our first guest is Chris Damppall. And she is the curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor Emerida at the School of Media Studies at the New School. She has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally on art and technology. She literally wrote the book, Digital Art, which was first published in 2003. And she has written many other texts as well, including a companion to digital art, which came out in 2016. So we are very honored to have her as a guest today. And then our next guest is Casey Rees, Easy Co-Founder of Processing the Art Center Computer Language, which has become the foundation for a vast majority of today's generative art. And we'll talk about why that is today. And part of that is because of all of the time and dedication that Casey and others have put into education and keeping the program free and open source. But Casey is also an artist and since the early 2000s, his work has been showcased around the world with numerous solo and group exhibitions at institutions like the Momma, Dam, Christie's, and others like Bitforms in New York, many of his most iconic pieces reside in the permanent collections of major museums. And we are extremely grateful to have him join us for our talk today. And our next guest is Dr. Christa Summer, who is an artist and the professor of Interface Cultures and Study Program at the Institute for Media at the University of Art and Design in Lens Austria. Her works have been created largely in collaboration with Laurent Minot. We are really excited to have Christa on today, because Her work explores artificial life and the intermediate field of art, science, and technology. A lot of it is based on simulations and has been developed in creative environments for interaction and really involves participation from the audience and viewers. So in a lot of ways, I think Christa and Laurent's work from the '90s and 2000s is the artistic forebearer for a lot of today's AI art. And so we're really excited to have Christa on today. And then, Gohan Levin is the professor of electronic art at the School of Art at the Carnegie Mellon University, where his pedagogy is concerned with reclaiming computation as a medium of personal expression. He has been active in software art since 1995, and his work has been included in the permanent collections of venues like MoMA, Cooper, Hewitt, Smithsonian, Design Museum, and the Whitney. And again, we are so excited to have you join us, as well, Gohan. What just an incredible panel, again, we've been so lucky to have just amazing panels for all these chapters. And this one does not disappoint. And I've been speaking a lot, and it's been really great to learn more about our guests, but now it's time to hear more from them directly. Maybe we can start with Christiane and about, well, it's very convenient that Christiane you wrote a book and the title of the book is Digital Art. And it came out originally, at least, in the decade that we are focusing on today. So I wonder if you could tell us about how did it end up in 2003 that you wrote that book? And what was the scope of the book back then? And why did you choose that particular scope? And again, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for inviting me and it's such a pleasure to be here with artists I've been working with for a long time. So I think in the early 2000s, we were once again in one of the upswings of Digital Art and a lot of interest in it to a point where Thames and Hudson, the publisher of Digital Art, decided to include a volume on Digital Art and on Internet Art in the World of Art series. And that originally led to the publication of that book. And yeah, you mentioned it. It came out in its fourth edition last year in 2023. And also has been translated into six languages at this point. So it has longevity. But in the original edition, I was looking at the history of Digital Art from the early days, from the algorithms of the 1960s and the generative art of that time. Until that point, if you look at the fourth edition, then you are seeing work up to, I think, 2022. So the scope has always been to trace Digital Art through our decades. - Well, yeah, thank you for that further introduction. And I have a question also for Casey. And Casey, really it's incredible to have you with us today as the co-founder of processing. And it was also so instrumental in this decade as it continues to be two decades later. And yeah, I wonder if you can talk about DBN or design by numbers. And that transition to processing at MIT when you were studying under John Mayda, what were you and Ben with processing looking to expand upon from John's design by numbers? - Sure, thanks Peter. I think an interesting thing about this group is I think we've all known each other for this full time, since around 2000 and been in dialogue for this entire time too, more or less. Gollon was also at the Media Lab at the same time that I was there. He arrived a year before me. John Mayda, who was the director of the aesthetics and computation group first released, designed by numbers, I think in 1999. And he was the author and engineer of the first version. And his vision for that was to make coding accessible. And one way he did that was through the language itself, but also making it more minimal. And so, It was black and white only. It was 100 by 100 pixels. And so because it was so minimal in the visual constructions, you could make. The language was very short. It was very quick to learn. We could sit down with someone who'd never coded before. And within like a half hour, within an hour, people were making things. And I think that was the most extraordinary thing about design by numbers. And then a lot of us started teaching with it. Me, Ben Fry, Elise Co. Goal on. We started teaching with DBN. And we noticed that after that first day or the first week of people using it, they really wanted to express themselves in visual ways that extended beyond that 100 by 100 pixel grayscale box. And so the idea of processing has been fine. I were starting that in the spring of 2001 was really to make processing as approachable design by numbers, to have it be minimal, to allow people to start coding very quickly, but to continue to expand beyond that, to go full screen, to go into color, to go into 3D. That was the original idea. And I feel really confident saying that there's no way processing would exist without design by numbers being there first. And also, John really pushing Ben and I both into design by numbers. So after John worked on DBN, then Tom White had another round at the engineering behind it, and then Ben picked it up. And it was through like Ben picking up design by numbers at the code-based level. And me originally writing what we called the courseware, which was like the educational software around DBN. It was that direct engagement that John had sort of moved us into that led to the ideas around processing. I wanted to sort of say something about processing, but also more generally, what happened around the year 2000 with processing in DBN that I think is important. Casey, I think, doesn't give himself enough credit in terms of just saying, all we wanted to add color and full screen graphics to DBN. Because I think what the insight was with DBN and processing was a reaction, I think, to mid 1990s toolkits for artists. And I'm thinking specifically of macro media director and flash and the kind of constraints on artists that those corporate tools basically made in terms of what the circumscribed artists is not being able to make. With tools like with processing in DBN, suddenly you could make any arbitrary polygon, which was not possible with those earlier tools. You could suddenly have direct pixel access. You could say, make this pixel red. And previously, those tools had a conceptual model for what an artist might want to make. That was really, really limited and basically involved sort of the presentation of fixed media objects, like ready-made videos, canned audio, and sort of ready-made digital images that were typically photographs. That came out of like 1990s CD-ROM multimedia. And what we saw happening with DBN and processing was a kind of, I think, clawing back of what the computer could actually do in terms of allowing artists who were interested in formal aspects. And also educators who were interested in teaching people from the beginning up, not how to enter a career pipeline of making 1990s style CD-ROM multimedia, but rather how to think about what graphics can do. It's really important points. Because you hear a lot that Steve Jobs killed, flash, and that I hear that as an explanation as to why processing has become-- so it's used as become so ubiquitous. But in a lot of ways, that's not giving processing credit for the fact that it was free in a consortium also solving a lot of those structural issues that you were talking about, Colin. Yeah, I think it was just kind of a good transition to Christa here and how she was at MIT during 2001, working at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. And maybe Christa can maybe touch on a bit more of what she was working on there. And it would be interesting to kind of know if any of you kind of encountered each other or kind of discussed what you're working on at the time. And if there was kind of open dialogue between kind of these areas of visual studies and computational design. Yeah, thank you, everybody. I'm very happy to be here with you. Yeah, it's a good question. Actually, our journey together with Laurent Minionau, a French artist and also developer, started in 1992 in Frankfurt, where we met at Peter Vible's Institute of Numeria. And there, artists like us were able to work with then quite advanced computers, called Silicon Graphics Computers. And we could also use these computers and program visual graphics by ourselves. So in that sense, it was a very unique situation, because we could access to these high end graphic computers. And also experiment with the technology there. And also develop code by ourselves. And especially Laurent, who had already programmed since his early childhood, was able to work with growing algorithms then at 1993, we were very lucky to be at the Asylectronic Festival, which was dedicated to artificial life. And when we saw the projects there, and also listened to the lectures by Christopher Langstone, there was Larry Yeager, there was Carl Simms, we really got super inspired by the idea of using genetic algorithms and artificial life for our own out productions. And mostly, at that time, this was also an idea and the principle that Peter Vibro was a keen at. And also wrote a lot of text about it was this idea of interactivity. So Laurent, myself, we were sort of in this context of the Institute for New Media, and then developing code that can evolve, that has some forms of artificial evolution. This was the starting point for Laurent, myself. And the time that you referred to at MIT Media Lab, with this was Steve Benton, who I think passed away a long time ago. He-- we were some artistic residency there for half a year, but I don't think that we actually met the KC and Roland. I think the time when we met was more at Asylectronic, I'm not sure remember in for sure at the Code Festival in Asylectronic 2000. Yeah, 2003 Code Festival at Asylectronic. It was a big one for a lot of things, yeah. And I think, Roland, you were also an artistic residency at Asylectronic Lab at Future Lab from what I remember. For the early 2000s, I spent my summers there doing various projects, that's right? Exactly. Yeah, so we kept meeting in different places and also exhibitions, of course. And Christiana, we know each other, I think also since the early 1990s already, where we met the different festivals. And also, I remember that Christiana exhibited our evolve, the interactive pool in Boston. Was it Boston? Yeah, it was in Boston, I think. And that was also a really wonderful experience. So yes, we have been meeting. And of course, we know they well the work of each other. And our students are also using processing. So I think it's really a very awesome teaching tool and also a very good way for artists to not programming directly by themselves. A good way of getting into code and making really cool artwork. So it's a very wonderful tool. Yeah, zooming out a bit and connecting the dots between all of those great contributions. I think there were some significant shifts between the '90s and 2000s that also really put generative art into a new phase, a new category. Of course, there was the excitement of the web in the '90s. There were early AI projects that were happening, but not only due to computing power, but also the whole social environment of social media coming about in 2003. And this focus on databases and database aesthetics, I think we entered a new phase. And it's also indicative that during that period, I commissioned works by Casey and by Golan for the Whitney's Artport website. And once again, it was this time of data visualization, gaining a lot of traction in the generative realm. And Golan did terrific pieces. The dumpster, I think you were also included in the Whitney Biennial with one of them. Casey really connected the dots when it came to early generative art with focus on conceptual art practices and the connection of generative art to that. And we commissioned his software structures. I cannot work with Christa at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but we did indeed work on a show together where Avalf was exhibited. in the early 2000s, 2004 in Boston at a gallery there, which also included a lot of generative art and this idea of artificial life really entered a new phase at that time. We're on topic with art port, Krishan, and you've really helped kind of lead that initiative since the early 2001 being one of the main curatorial visions for the project and the internet is kind of something that's ever evolving and especially over the last two decades has drastically changed. So I'm just kind of curious to see if there has been any change, how is that curatorial mission or vision change for art port throughout this time? And maybe some of your favorite highlights for your work that you've done at art port. So that's a great question. The curatorial mission had has not changed at all because we always saw art port as a platform that would chronicle the evolution of art on the web. So basically we put this platform into a position where it was an observer. But during that process of observation a lot changed over the decades definitely and it's really interesting to look at the pieces we started with a series called Gate Pages and that was the time of splash pages. Pop-up windows were being consistently blocked. There were so many art websites doing splash pages and the Gate Pages were meant to be an introduction to artist's work and many of the artists did really exciting mini pieces during that time for those pages. And then if you look at art port which of course commissioned in the beginning only a couple of projects per year, now it's way more consistent, you can still make out certain types of narratives in the works mentioning once again cases and golands works. And that's very different from the current biennial project that is on art port curated by Meg Onley and Chrissy Isles that is very much focused on AI and essentially is a Laura for stable diffusion, very different world from the early 2000s. So many things to jump in about. I think it was that time in the early 2000s also where code was able to run in the browser in a new way. I think through things like Java Amplits, through things like Flash. And the idea of that was that people were making things, releasing it like on a daily basis, on a weekly basis and things were just like spreading across the world. People were seeing generative art running in the browser in a really substantial way. There was this idea of view source, this idea of sharing the code with each other and that just was a really strong e-vote in the world. And I think allowed these things to grow very, very quickly. I think before, like Chris mentioned, these look on graphics machines. You know, these are $50,000 or $200,000 computers. The work could only be seen in the museum. And now all the sudden, people could see generative work anywhere they were like with an internet connection. And I think that allowed this stuff to spread very, very quickly. And that kind of happened at scale in the early 2000s. I wanted to also emphasize, I mean, the art port was really significant in supporting and collecting this kind of work. But to underscore, Christian's point that what we started to see was not just that there could be interactive graphics in a rectangle in the browser, but also what, how those graphics started to use the internet as its subject as well. That the networked condition, the condition of being in a network and having connections to each other was suddenly reflected as a subject matter of the material. And you would see this in works like Josh Ains, they rule, or you'd see it, it works like my secret labs of numbers where, and you might call these works, I think this kind of way of working with this sort of an interest also in very large databases, whether accessing them or creating them was also something that as Chris John pointed out arose at that time. I think today there's a name for it, a Sam Levine calls it scrapism, right? This kind of way of acquiring large amounts of data by hook and by crook and then sort of presenting it back to the public as a mirror of society. But that really became possible at a kind of a very different scale in the early 2000s where suddenly you could, like I did write a program that would scrape a million numbers and then present it in a browser and then people could experience it and kind of understand something about society that was, that was, that they couldn't understand or see before. Just a quick footnote, in the 90s you had that, let's say impulse to, there was a lot of recycling of information on the web going on, but to go on's point scale is really key here. In the early 2000s, this just entered a completely different scale compared to the 90s and its recycling of web pages. That wasn't yet scrapism. At that point data was wide open, it was pre-snowed and it was pre-deep concerns about privacy and surveillance and that was a huge difference at that moment and then what's been happening in the last decade. Maybe if I could actually, from my observation, I would say that in the early 90s, this was a very small group of people who was very internationally connected but it was a small group of artists that met at the festivals, at CIGRAV, at ICER, at Asselecronica and then in 2000, suddenly more people joined in and it's certainly also due to the tools that were available but also I think at that time already the first graduates came out of the different universities and so I think academia also played a big role because suddenly we had more young people that were involved in computer art creation and then of course later on at the end of 2000s these people were becoming professors themselves. So this whole academic field also I think had a huge impact on the sustainability and also on the diversification of media art and digital art. One thing about the education, I think it's a really good point and something I do want to talk about is I was talking to Karsten Schmidt who's known as TalkSea and he was he was really telling me about how the importance of of what processing did with education is that it didn't make these institutions or these students reliant on commercial software anymore so they had this free and open source software available and how that really changed the way it was taught because now you know suddenly it could be taught basically for free before it was very expensive to acquire all those licenses for for macro media and for Adobe. Well just really brief here like to say I think even more important than the cost of that is that as artists we're making our own tools and we're forming them based on what we want them to do rather than relying on the corporate entities to imagine what we want to do and to release that. I think having control over our own tools is the most essential thing about that for me. Goal on is very articulate about that. I'm an evangelist for whatever case he's doing. But yeah now I mean the open source software tools for the arts really blossomed in that decade. Something that we should also not neglect is the birth of Arduino roughly in 2005 at Iverea which was sort of they were students of cases at the time who were working on it. It came out of a system called wiring before that. I was just a couple weeks ago talking to a very high-placed person at the National Science Foundation here in the United States and I mentioned well you know Arduino which is widely used in every mechanical and engineering department, every robotics department, every sort of you know stem type maker space. I was like you know Arduino started as a project by artists and they did not know that and I felt like we should probably underscore that because the way that Arduino for example has penetrated into the stem spaces where it's history as having emerged from the arts because tools like basic stamp at the time did not meet the needs of artists were not easy to learn to use were not artists friendly. Should not be forgotten and you know I think we'll see this again when we start to see sort of the processing philosophy begin to really shape computer science education which I think it's very very well poised to do. Yeah go on I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about the work that you were doing and the the early part of this decade that we're looking at. So what I love about it is just how how unique and diverse the work was I mean work like tele-symphony where you orchestrated an audience's mobile phones to ring and unison or alphabet synthesis machine you know these projects are all very different at they're all involved a lot of audience participation but they they have software their heart. And I'm wondering how you what what do you see as maybe tying those projects together and how do you see them aligning with the major themes of of the decade that we've talked about which you know are these kind of increases and tooling and but also things like like you know interactivity and and and the rise of of social and and mobile phones and art and any kind of theme from the decade. I'll try and keep this brief because I've already had the privilege of speaking a bunch but I consider myself something of a generalist and new media and for that reason the work I do doesn't really fit well within any kind of one category. I've been interested in generativity interactivity the network condition data visualization life performance as I mentioned you know I really felt the sort of shackles of something like macro media director in the mid 1990s and I just wanted to make blobs and you know there was no way of doing so and so some of the work like my audio visual environment suite with you know which I made as my master's thesis with John made at MIT was about just kind of exploring or demonstrating or both the sort of plasticity the real plasticity of digital media in ways that I think the commercial tools didn't allow part of that was an aesthetic and formal kind of goal of sort of like let's make really interesting blobs and part of that was a kind of maybe almost a political statement about what you know the commercial tools couldn't do and to kind of to show another path. And performances I did a lot of performances in the early 2000s and I think that was one reason was because it was actually very difficult to do sort of full screen impressive audio visual real time audio visual synthesis and graphics in the browser even though it became newly possible to do some degree of that you know to really make immersive experiences in the browser was still quite difficult and maybe even is still kind of difficult today. And so performances became a way that I could do that I I would say I never wanted to achieve the kind of aesthetic perfection that somebody like Rio G. E. K. That focuses on but rather I was so always interested in kind of conceptual propositions about what form could do and what what what plastic media could achieve and so you know tell us infinity was a sort of conceptual study about what happens if we can control the audience's mobile phones I did a project with a Dutch. To to to performers Yacht Blanc and Joan the barber sort of saying like what if we could visualize the voice in in in you know real time ways and these performances were conceptual propositions sort of exposing what media could be like. And I mean if I to tie it all together I'd say I think what the job of what a job of a media artist can be is kind of exploring what future media might be like or kind of exposing the new aesthetics and new politics may possible by by new technologies it's a really interesting question how that gets shaped when you know in the 60's there's maybe 10 people making art with computers in the 70's there's 100 in the 80's there's a thousand and 90's just 10,000 and you know like like. It what's expressed really changes when the number of people making art in this way is you know exponentially going up and suddenly using computers is no longer such a special thing or even such a kind of rejected thing as it was in 1968 or something. Yeah I really like how you kind of describe yourself as a generalist of new media like you don't like to tie yourself down to anyone particular thing just kind of explore what you think is really fun but I think one thing that is at least commonly seen is systems based approaches to creating some type of interactive art or a journey to bar whatever it may be. And maybe I think on this know we can maybe jump to Christianity and talk about I think you recently talked with Peter about how the interest in technology based art can kind of fluctuate kind of see sometimes these really high spikes in interest all by maybe long drawn out periods of apathy. And we kind of see this throughout the 60's throughout the 80's 90's do you kind of see in today's kind of terms in the contemporary space you see us having kind of a broader interest that's growing or do you see us kind of having a correction to kind of this highly. I guess investor interested spike that we saw was kind of the 2021 2022 wave of this NFT space having these these drastic economic implications. You're absolutely right there always are the waves you know digital art and interest in digital art also or mostly institutionally because the practitioners of course keep going you know it's more the art world per se or other entities paying attention or not. And I would say that we're definitely still very much in a high due to AI and focus on that part of digital technology I don't see that going away anytime soon and what all of us have been seeing and preaching for decades is the continuous digitization of our lives that has always been ongoing you know no matter. Who paid interest and I think we probably reached a critical moment where that is just not going away predictably the whole NFT hype collapsed a lot. Good I think that's what most of us were waiting for that doesn't mean that artists aren't doing interesting work on the blockchain I mean I think it's a more interesting space now because artists working in that way I'm much more committed to generativity to on chain work I mean Casey did it great job with the fair trial putting great practitioners to the four it's not. All about JPEGs and spinning and before hanging on the blockchain anymore and once again I think the it's just inextricably tied to economic factors and at this point I can see so many people trustees of museums suddenly being very interested in the space not only for art historical reasons but because they see a real market in. I think that also uniquely positions digital art as a medium to critically reflect on that and provide a reality check but yeah I would say we're in a high upside of the curve and I don't see it collapsing in the near future. I think that the touch on kind of the interest in AI and how that's really grown drastically recently and we talked about kind of art port and Whitney working with Holly hand on recently kind of showcase some of her kind of work and collection and even like interactiveness with allowing kind of viewers of the project to work with stable diffusion and kind of come out with their own outputs. But maybe we can jump over to Kristen and have her maybe expand a bit more on like the project we talked about but like evolve and in life writer and mobile feelings and and maybe how you see those as potential predecessors to what we see today with a I.R. I think a big part of this also is the definition of a I.R. is ever changing and there's kind of a lot of sub categories of what we see as a I.R. or artificial life or whatever you want to call it so maybe expand a bit on more on that and how you see that as kind of acting. Before what we see today. Yeah, thank you. Conrad for your question. Yes, it's quite interesting because in the early 90s we made this works that are very specifically dealing with generative algorithms and artificial life and evolution and several of these works are now actually right now on display at our big retrospective exhibition, which was a T.C. And so it's all then here in Lins, it has a electronic then in Brussels and right now in Bilbao and what we can observe is from the perception of people when they experience this work when they interact with the work. Nothing has changed and that's quite astonishing because some of this works a 30 years old. And so what we always like really surprised about is digital art doesn't really age much because when the code is working or when the interaction is working it's actually if you keep it presenting the way it was it's actually still very fresh and also the people's interaction or curiosity towards the work or the way they engage with the work is still the same. So in that sense I think that's quite surprising to us and also astonishing but of course we have to see also that the context has changed now while maybe Christiana you know remember probably quite well at the beginning of the 90s people were in all when something moved on the computer they were not used to have computers of course now there is everyone has mobile phone in the pocket that most people are super. You know media savvy so even though they are so used to have technology mostly in waiting or you know in every part of their life there's still in a way open to deal with media art that is you know talking about life talks about evolution that talks about generativity that talks about learning processes so I think if you. Keep working on the concepts of the work and maybe the message in a way. then this works done really age and that's a big surprise to us. And coming back to your question about AI and AI connection, I was just digging out some of the early publications on AI life. There was a lot of conferences. Christopher Langton was the main editor of this books back then at the Santa Fe Institute. And if you read this text here, for example, there's one from Charles Taylor. When you read the definitions that they gave and also the predictions that they made about the future, it's exactly what we see now with AI as well. So I think there's not that much difference between the discussions that we had in the early '90s about AI life. And the discussions we are having now about AI. Because at the end of the day, I think it's about automatic processes. It's about creation. It's about how can we learn principles of creation and how can artists, I mean from an artistic point of view, how can artists use this? But I see how I find, I don't know this way, it would be a very interesting question I have to Christiane Golan and Casey since you're all teaching. What I see now, however, is some kind of big fear among our students about AI and I often heard, oh my god, I think I'm going to give up my artistic practice because AI can do it much better and I don't see any more need of doing anything. And this is for me a bit shocking to hear that from young media artists that they are starting to feel overwhelmed by AI technology instead of trying to shape it and make it fit their needs. So this would be something I'm super curious. Maybe it's a very different situation in the United States, but here I see that more and more art students become quite critical about these automatic creation using AI systems. Yeah, so I want to add to that on two fronts, first of all, coming back and adding to your points about the overlaps between AI and AI. I think those are mainly in several areas, both fields modeling lifelike biological processes, which AI uses to develop neural networks and evolutionary algorithms than the study of complex systems and the emergence of complex behaviors and the use of optimization techniques, for example, to determine fitness. I think those are the main areas of overlap. I do your question in terms of practice. I would also say that I see not necessarily fear, but really students being turned off by AI software and technologies. First of all, I believe that still is a huge misunderstanding of what AI art is and can be. Because if you really see it as text-to-image models that generate output on the basics of a simple prompt, the result I would hardly call art in any way. They are insta-kitch engines when it comes to that. And all the artists doing great work, such as Casey, for example, it requires a lot of training of models on specific data sets. It requires even working with prompts, a lot of tweaking and massaging of code of models to do something that is truly transformative and reflects on these systems. And I think there's huge potential in that. What I have seen among students and also young visitors to the Harold Cohen exhibition that I curated for the Whitney that is still on view is them being completely turned off by the aesthetics of those softwares, which they absolutely hate just because of the blurry extrapolation and canny feeling. And you can still see the training data sets and this normative aesthetics in them. But they loved Harold Cohen, for example. And so that was an expression of AI encoded by an artist that they were very much attracted to. So I would definitely say that I have seen the same kind of criticality among students of the current softwares. And I think it would be unfortunate if they get turned away and do not realize that these are also very interesting tools to use and that it's an area that badly needs them to reflect on these tools and their implications on our levels. The impact of AI is so multifaceted and so complicated. And there's such amazing interesting things that are happening and such dreadful and awful things that I'm like, where to even begin. It's impacting culture in lots and lots of ways. And of course, artists should be dealing with that. But all the best and all the worst all wrapped up in one. Yeah, I think I have a lot of-- a lot of swimming around. It was really vague. But I think the 1960s was the moment for the birth of the ideas around AI. The 1990s were a huge surge in artificial life. I think a lot of artists, myself included, Chris's works that I've seen with Laurent, were really inspired by that 90s artificial life research. And for me, that was all expressed in the early 2000s. I studied-- I had a class with a computer-- sorry, a robotics professor named Rodney Brooks, who wrote this book called "Cambrian Intelligence." And I think the fundamental idea of that book is let's stop thinking about intelligence, like just playing intelligence. And let's think about behaviors and simulation of behaviors. And if we can get that, if we can get to sort of the simulation of bugs and insects and things like that, we're actually going to be much closer to intelligence and if we focus on higher level processes. And so for me, that was like the idea that cracked open a lot of things that I spent a decade exploring. And I believe a lot of Christmas installations were thinking about those ideas too. What if art can mutate? What if art can evolve? These ideas, I think, which are very different from working with painting and drawing, were able to emerge through software as a medium at these moments. Yeah, and I think Christian really just hits it target perfectly when it's thinking a lot of this contemporary stigmas against it can be maybe driven towards those texts to image prompts and maybe seeing the effort isn't always there. Sometimes is what I think a lot of people critique it for. But I think what Christo says is, if the message is strong in the work, it creates a timeless environment around the piece. And if it's conceptually strong, I think it's really important. And just like Christian also said, is artists that are able to create their own neural networks and work with their own data sets, so looking at people like Sophia Crespo and Anna Ridler and Casey, I think just that little bit of effort and maybe more like artist's hand in the work, not so much working with a black box system can create a lot more appreciation for the work that's being created in it. I want to maybe touch the goal. And you had this opening statement with your creative dialogue episode with Claire Henscher. And you mentioned this idea that some people may be see AI as an end to visual culture. And I feel like this is a stigma. And I think you also mentioned that this is a stigma that's constantly proven wrong over and over again. It's applied to many other things. But is this a stigma that you maybe felt in the 2000s from outside viewers or outside critics regarding not just AI art, but maybe any kind of computer digital art that you were creating at the time? In the early 2000s, I certainly felt like things were cracked wide open because it suddenly became possible to do interactive real-time dynamic form. And certainly in 2D and also to a sent and sent in 3D. I think AI-- one of the most positive experiences I've ever had with AI was actually with Casey. When mid-journey was brand new, we were both there in the discord together. And we were just basically like one up in each other, riffing on each other's prompts. So I would say something like chocolate chip sculpture. And Casey would respond with sprinkles or something like that. And yes, it was amazing that it could make these things. But to me, the really big innovation of mid-journey, which they've never sort of like-- I mean, Joel Simon has kind of picked up on this more than they have-- is this sort of the weird social space that creative people exchanging images back and forth for fun that were sort of made on the spot as they realize their imagination and pictures of ridiculous and nonsensical things that looked real enough to be funny. Was that the individual cultural? I think we're closer to the individual culture when we have a condition now that Christianan politely used the word normative. But it's just regurgitated stuff that is this kind of every culture chopped up and pure. and kind of represented in this very average way. I'm quite hopeful that the cultural proceed. Nick Cave had a great quote about AI in his many articles, the singer, sort of saying like, AI might make a good song, but it'll never make a great one 'cause it literally lacks the nerve. What we like when we like a great song and I'm kind of interpolating Nick Cave here is like we like the voice of the person that we're hearing. We like to connect into a real person. And this goes back to what Krista said before. I might like a piece of AI art, but not because it's a pretty image. It's like, oh, that stimulates all my neurons in the right way, but rather because I'm actually hearing the voice of a creative person behind it, whether it might be an interesting conceptual proposition or unique aesthetic that they were able to achieve by working it in ways that other people didn't put in the time to do. Like, I'm connecting with a human who is using a tool in an interesting way. And I think one of the things I like best about the best is the artist and I'm sitting in front of some of them, is like they make work that is like nobody else's. You know, I know the line by the mark of their claw. I can see a piece of Casey's, for a while Casey had an anonymous identity online. It didn't know, it was just this like, didn't say who it was, but Casey was releasing work under this anonymous name. And I was like, that shit looks a lot like Casey's. So the point where no one else could make work like that. I was like, I know the line by the mark of his claw. And I liked the work because it was attractive, but I also liked the work because it was Casey's voice. And I think there's lots of ways that we can appreciate people's voices, but I don't think there'll be any end to that. And I actually, I have been reading that same Nick Cave called to my students often. And he specifically references Nina Simón and Kurt Cobain. - That's the one. - And that kind of lived experience of a life that filters through in the music in this case. And that embodied experience and context and understanding is something AI just cannot have ever. And if you don't re-insert it through an artist, then it all becomes generic or the imitation game. - It's just these conversations around these decades are so fascinating because a few conversations ago, like we were talking about mainframe computers, with very limited computing power. Now we're talking about very advanced AI systems. And of course, as all of you know, these are like powers through Mars law, which is power's own, like through all these decades of digital art history. And I have a question specifically for Casey. Like in this decade that we're discussing the 2000s, more law also continues. There's a 20X increase in computing power. And I just wonder if this significant leap, if it increased the capabilities of the processing software like throughout the decades, was there like certain features that were possible at the end of the decades that weren't possible at the start? And if it also led to like an increased expressivity for you as an individual artist working with software. - Yes, for sure. I think a really huge shift happened in the very late 1990s with GPU technology. And so we talked a little, or I talked a little bit more about these SGI machines that were very exclusive, very hard to get access to. And now all of a sudden, like a Windows box with a good graphics card in a GPU could produce equivalent work. And so that made it much easier for people to get access to the kinds of machines they needed to express themselves or build what they really wanted to build. And so that they can use a moment of access, technical access, or really essential. When processing was first begun in 2001, it was made as a sketching link, which we called it a sketchbook. And I think that was one of the primary ideas of the software. But also, you know, you would make these really minimal, kind of small sketches. And then you would take what you learned from that and you would port that code to C++ in order to really run it in a quick high fidelity way. And then over the course of the 2000s, it became more and more, processing became more and more capable. As computers became more capable as a software developed. And then it no longer was a sketching environment. It was sort of a full production environment where you could start sketching and processing and then keep the software going and going, going to the final instance. So that was a major shift in the way that I think I thought and a lot of people thought about processing. But it's significantly the free software, the community part of processing really extended that. So making libraries for processing was a really important early thing that allowed other people to contribute what they were experts into the source code. So Ben and I were graphics people, but other people were computer vision people, audio people, simulation people, et cetera. People like Carson Smith, Toxie, contributed a lot to the processing source code. And in my own work, if I needed to integrate, so I want to do track people in the environment for doing an interactive performance piece, all of a sudden there were libraries for processing that other people had made that I could use in my own work. So it allowed a lot of people to extend their practice through that sharing and through that community development. Yeah, I mean, that ethos I think is so important. And maybe it doesn't get talked about enough. And again, something that Tarsten, when I was speaking to him, really drove home is that ethos that dates back to Yvonne Iliadchen and the early computer programmers and early computer theorists. And was that something that was explicitly on your mind with processing Casey, when with that ethos that you've mentioned before? And I know that it was explicitly embedded into the kind of verbiage of processing itself with floss. And maybe you can explain that too. But I also just think that you're talking about access. And this decade was so important with access, because it's when really smartphones were launched. And when processing too gave so many people more access to software. So yeah, I'm wondering if you could talk a bit more about that ethos. And then maybe we can all close with thinking about maybe what some of these major themes are from this decade or what some of the main takeaways from this decade are. Yeah, no software code being open for people to read have access to is as long as code is being written. And it wasn't until later that code began to be locked down in proprietary. And so processing wouldn't have been possible to make without other open source code libraries. It was built on top. The ideas you have the set of modular pieces that can be put together in different ways. And so processing has a free open source license in the same way that lots of the software that comprise it do as well. And that kind of carries forward. Yeah, I think we have touched upon so many points and the 2000s brought about major shifts technologically and what was accessible to people, new software tools that really expanded the range. As Krista pointed out, I think we also really saw a change in the landscape due to the new wave of students graduating from schools carrying that practice further. We saw at least the beginnings of big data, not as we are experiencing it today and really nurturing the current AI waves. But this whole idea of more massive data sets and what they meant for artistic practice or so really brought a change to generativity. So I think the 2000s really brought about a new level of understanding technologies, also very much due to social media and connectivity, not necessarily communication, reaching a new level on different types of platforms with all of their potential and problems. I wanted to just toss in a really quick comment. A big difference between me now and me in the 2000s is I'm now the parent of teenagers. My kids were born the same year as Twitter. And they've only known increasing and shittification. They've only known the internet to get worse and worse. And so they actually hate computers, which is really interesting to me. My older kid hates computers. And their grandfather is actually is more like an engraver in an architect with traditional analog media, wasteland real instruments and tools. And so I do see a strange interesting backlash coming against the kind of a generation that does not have the enthusiasm that I had in the mid to late '80s saying, I want to make art with computers. It's like, no, they want nothing to do with it. And they want real experiences and things that are ephemeral. And I guess the question I have about the 2000s is, sort of like maybe look as we look back to not only see how the seeds of today were planted then, but also to sort of check to see what sorts of concepts we've maybe left behind and kind of a weight rediscovery. Like I was looking at the timeline and I'm privileged to be in it and I thought it was great Peter, but I also like oh yeah, where's Blast Theory? You know like where's all that like a femoral stuff that that was not as someone recently put it like you know a proposition for interior decor or a financial instrument, but like where's like this kind of like weird just like experience you have out in the streets of a city that technology may be possible. So I kind of I wait thinking about like what did we lose from that decade that maybe we need to kind of recover? Yeah I agree with you Lecolan, I think it's really when I remember the 90s and also 2000 there was this way and to the astic spirit you know this idea of oh we are going to change the world we are going to you know work with this cool technology and things got better but now often we see that you know technology has not always been used in the in that positive way and especially with social media and you know people get problems sometimes they are like you know being bullied or there's a lot of things that we could not anticipate at least I could not anticipate it I did not see this coming I have to say so it's understandable that younger generations are more critical about the technology and sometimes also a little bit more reluctant to use it and generally feel like they you know they they view it with more suspicion than what we we did back then so I think that's interesting but on the other hand I think it also means that there is maybe some more big a need for artists to deal with this sort of you know social topics on a critical level but also on a technological level so I think Asel Electronica is a very good festival for this this year that topic is hope which I think is very good you know in times of war and in times of Ukrainian war and Israel war and so on a lot of young people feel like they are you know it's it's a negative spin things are kind of very bad bad news being bombarded on them and so I think this idea of hope and creating a better future even though it's just throughout and technology I think is a really good topic that we should look at so I'm quite hopeful in that sense yeah and I think it's a really good point that our relationship with technology also evolves just just like institutional interest in this kind of art evolves like our relationship with technology evolves you know people from different generation where you know fearful of it because of you know computer's relationship with war and and lots of movies that were against it but yes now we've kind of accepted it more but now we may be as Golem was saying we may be trending in the opposite direction and and it's probably a good spot to wrap it up but thank you all everybody and and what again what it treats I mean what what an honor to host such distinguished panel and we're really thankful for everybody's time and and participation and and your thoughts and what you've contributed of course as well I think Christian some some did up really well from my perspective I'm really grateful for bringing us together thank you so much it's really good to see Chris to you it's been a while and go on we don't see each other enough for sure thank you thank you thank you thank you so much