I just finished my second pop-up show. During the presentation, I talked about phased creation that about the randomness behind the machine learning generated images. At the end of the, I got one question from one of our tutors. Following is my reflection about that question.
Q: The artist you reference Jackson Pollock for example spent many years perfecting his technique so would not strictly characterise this as “random” - might be interesting to look at different levels of ambiguity possible within computational processes and get a more precise definition of what you intend when placing “randomness” as a desirable quality?
I assume that you mean the randomness in Pollock’s painting is not real randomness.
As you said that Pollock had practiced for many years, and also some researches indicate that they did find some fractals in his painting. However, when he was painting on the canvas, he did not control every stroke and drew those fractals consciously.
I am not saying that unconsciousness is equal to randomness, just maybe we have not found the mechanism (rules) in the so-called unconsciousness, like before we can predict the next number generated by ‘noise()’ function, we call it as ‘random’. Nevertheless, we still can not say there is no randomness in Pollock’s painting.
Randomness is a kind of tricky stuff. In the scientific research field, it seems like people have not found a real mechanism which can prove that randomness exists in this world, but we do have a vocabulary to describe this kind of phenomenon. As so far, randomness still can not be real randomness, the only thing we can do is to modify the level of its ‘complexity’. For example, technically, the randomness used in both creative coding, such as noise and random functions, and AI algorithms, such as a generative adversarial network (GAN), aims to get unpredictable values, but the difference is in the algorithms, to what extent human would like to control the so-called random outcomes directly.
In this sense, how could we say his techniques are not strictly random?
How do you think of the ‘strictly random’? Do you mean an absolute status?
How is your feeling if I argue that the randomness is formed as a sense of order under some coincidences?
I assume your question is about the values of Pollock’s paintings.
I did not consider his painting in the whole art history, maybe the randomness is a really tiny point in his painting, which means I should not reference his work when I talk about the topic of randomness.
There are also a lot of artistic works about randomness, such as Andy Goldsworthy, who uses nature as a medium, which contains a lot of randomness phenomena. However, I want to give people a straight sense of comparing AI with humans.
Q: If the whole art history context is important?