Do artists stand on the brink of obsolescence as the industry culture permeates not just platforms like ChatGPT, Bard, LLaMA, and others, but also replicates the very essence of human creativity, which has been our species’ defining achievement? Recently, numerous news reports, opinion pieces, and open letters have expressed concerns about an impending wave of artificial intelligence. At the same time, many of these critics have expressed optimism for a “co-cre-AI-tion” era, envisioning a multitude of innovative “outputs” that can only come to fruition through collaboration between users and systems. (Grimes is praised for sharing her voiceprint and royalties with DIY producers, who have produced thousands of head-splitting hyperpop and ketamine-friendly vaporwave tracks.) The most favorable outcomes for artists appear to be a drastic shift towards prompt engineering – a “job of the future” according to the World Economic Forum – which involves optimizing text to extract valuable insights from large language models, or a surge in demand for products certified as human-made and free from algorithms.
The Renaissance in Italy and Ancient Greece are often credited for valuing both invention and tradition, dismissing the anonymous achievements of societies as ‘craftsmanlike’. They are seen as cultural milieus that linked creativity as a tool for self-actualization in democratic societies, while also blaming communism for dehumanization and conformity. Samuel Franklin (2023) observes that the term ‘creativity’ has become equally incoherent and ubiquitous, attached to problem-solving in various fields such as psychology, education, cooking, and coding. Surprisingly, Franklin notes that the future of art is more closely intertwined with the state of humanity than the future of humanity itself.
The products are now facing dispossession at the hands of their own visionaries, as coders are being remade as once again, even the overeducated disposable proles are being turned into a creative class named code. This ideal of creativity is finally being undermined by the bohemian-approved tech-obsessed brand, which emerged from the mid-century marriage of innovation and artistry, and is now being undermined by economic violence. The postindustrial era paved the way for the new MBA to become the MFA, calming the nerves of workers and promoting progress as an artist and Western icon, while also promoting the values of Western progress and innovation.
How might AI prompt a reconsideration of the basic relationship between self-expression and self-realization for artists, by harnessing the power of synthetic media for the sake of spectacle or artifice, while scrutinizing the underlying systems and calling for investigations into the built-in biases and laws against automation warfare and intellectual property appropriation, where there’s a difference between manifestos accompanied by Refik Anadol’s ongoing, 2021-unseen, Unsupervised Remixes museum collections seen in real time or illustrations drawing crowds and consternation, expressing novel forms of creativity and selfhood?
Recently, I had my first experience with ChatGPT after seeing the exhibition “Real For” at Zurich Kunsthalle, where Thomas Kulendran Christopher and Annika Kuhlmann collaborated to create engrossing video installations that fuse AI and autobiography. Drawing on his family’s displacement from Sri Lanka during the state’s war with Tamil separatists from 1983 to 2009, the exhibition asserts the malleability of reality, serving as a powerful narrative that highlights the moral outrage and erosion of truth. It presents an alternative, cultish form of creativity.
The denial of the right of self-representation to a Tamil collective is evident in the video showcased in The Finesse, where the opposite wall is filled with computer-generated scenes of a sacred forest under the control of the Sri Lankan regime. These scenes are juxtaposed with projections on a fragmented screen made of free-standing mirrors. Kulendran Thomas’ personal narrative is submerged within The Finesse, through the use of sophisticated simulations, archival footage of the Tamil Tigers’ challenging utopia, and intimate portraits of fellow émigrés. The installations, Being Human (2019) and The Finesse (2022/23), create a fictional environment that evokes a sense of homeland and serves as a polemic response to the violent suppression of Tamil culture and history. By questioning the authenticity and individuality that can easily be fabricated and recognized as rhetorical devices, Kulendran Thomas prompts us to consider how the role of the artist can evolve, rather than focusing solely on bleak scenarios.
Contrasting herself with journalists, she claims to remake the physical world by using media and digital technologies. Yahoo! Pledges to dismantle the master’s house by taking up the tools offered by corporations and Western governments. She chides viewers for confusing reality with self-serving stories told by these entities. In a contrasting move, Manmahal, a militant named Tiger-held territory, shoots footage of visiting foreign reporters. Even in the dial-up era, the Tigers seize the internet as a tool to puncture the state’s version of reality. The Sri Lankan regime’s economic and propaganda warfare is countered by the Tigers’ effort to link millions of militants who had fled the island to the internet. The centres where this counter effort against the Tigers’ regime works are operating on the internet.
Later, Manmahal watches the verdict of the trial of J. O. Simpson in a makeshift cabin packed with fighters, questioning if the drama on CNN is a concoction of media or a site of information warfare. She dares her audience to compare her own glowing face to J. O.’S as the viewer of The Finesse asks if the graininess of the footage is a sign of forgery or authenticity. The Internet Black Tigers have conjured a myth or history from training data, confirming a quick search that ‘cyber force’ conducted ‘suicide’ bombings on Sri Lankan embassies. But the relationship between representation and reality does not resolve the story Manmahal takes over, speaking with compatriots about the struggle for a local autonomy-based utopia as well as the digital community. Echoed by a deepfake created by Kardashian Kim, Manmahal slips into the digital realm of fabrication as her persona reflects her own transition from childhood entanglement to mastery and trial. She is backed up by Tamil dancer and filmmaker Thirunavukarasu Asmina, who tells the story.
Create, but not just synthesize and arrange, those who do not agree that the rise of Basquiat bots will result in the extinction of old-fashioned artists tend to mean something different. There are two camps that constitute culture – those who see the offloading of tedious tasks like synthesizing and arranging as a boon to augment the human species and those who see it as an existential threat to the underlying social ties and labor processes that make up culture. Generally, AI is said to be either a boon to augment our species by offloading tedious tasks and augmenting our brains or an existential threat to the ineffable processes and social ties that make up culture. This question tends to be sidestepped in current debates about creativity and art. If identities are fungible commodities and reality is an endless stream of content to be framed, organized, manipulated, and interpreted, then what else is the artist to do but counterfeit the Kardashians?
Most artists, I know, are more in line with Thomas Kulendran than with futurists or luddites, but they’ve grown up as screen-addled cyborgs and are dubious of the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘derivative,’ eager to prevent the appropriation of the world’s IP from being appropriated by a handful of lawless corporations in the pursuit of phantasmic revenue streams. Imagine a world where AI-enhanced search instantly connects the indebted to predatory landlords and payday lenders, displacing them, while also being concerned about the reproduction of signature styles rather than the all-take-winners cultural economy sustained by the mythical kinship of progress and artistry. They think certain aspects of human creativity are inimitable and unlikely to be devalued without believing they’ll earn a place in the caste of overlord if they only cultivate empathy or assimilate archaic worldviews, as recommended in a headlined op-ed in the New York Times, ‘Being Human’ in the Age of A.I.
The effect of subjectivity or historical context on art can be disorienting yet captivating. The cascading styles and forms contribute to this disorienting, yet arresting effect.
He has an animated body with boundless creativity, and the experiences and digital artifacts he shares could be attributed to the corpus. Although Thomas Kulendran’s gestural hallucinations bear his signature, he asked Flusser how to obtain information that is “improbable” and “unpredictable” without reinforcing the belief in a god or creator that is venerated by all creative individuals or artists. In 1985, philosopher Vilém Flusser described the “central problem” of the dawning “computer age” as the generation of “information” in the former times when “creativity” was understood as the domain of isolated individuals. Instead of attempting to use the characteristics of self-heroic expression with subaltern abstraction in his paintings, I wondered if they are really his relics.
Andrea Rossetti’s photograph, showcased at Kunsthalle Zürich, is an installation created in collaboration with artist Kuhlmann Annika. The installation, titled “The Finesse,” is set to be viewed in 2022/23 and features the captivating image by Thomas Christopher Kulendran as its centerpiece.