by Ricky Burnett

Recently a friend engaged me in a conversation about art, aesthetics, meaning and the imagination – a gratuitous attempt on her part to whip up some light hearted back and forth over bagels and cream cheese. There was no surprise in this for me: she is an intelligent and curious woman and I’ve been in the arts all my adult life, sometimes a painter and teacher, at other times a critic, a researcher, a curator of exhibitions and a gallery owner. Over the last forty years I’ve seen a lot of stuff that’s treated as art, stuff that wants to be art and, stuff that is pretty damn much undeniably art. So her conversational tack was not unreasonable.

Now, I’m a luddite both by default and by temperament. The inner workings of anything non-biological bore and frustrate me; be they motor cars, bicycles, transistors radios, or computers. Especially computers. Words like – hard-drive, floppy and software carry a lascivious tone to my sensualist mind, and chips are things you eat with beer. I couldn’t tell a ram from byte if one got up and bit me. So when my friend introduced the topic of AARON the painter, a computing program conceived and developed by California artist Harold Cohen, and raised questions of artificial intelligence and art made by such ‘intelligence,’ my immediate reflex was to feel both blindsided and dismissive. Blindsided because I didn’t know anything about AARON or Cohen and dismissive, well, for all the obvious reasons, some of which I’ll go into shortly, because while obvious and perhaps passé they’re nevertheless fundamental.

My friend made an impassioned case for AARON (the program) to be seen as creative and therefore as an artist. I was unconvinced but intrigued enough by her enthusiasm to hook up to several websites and find out for myself what Aaron was about. Painters do like to see things in the flesh, so to speak.

In a 1994 paper Cohen suggested that AARON may be the oldest continuously developed program in computing history, beginning in the mid seventies, says Cohen, with a simple question “What is the minimum condition under which a set of marks functions as an image?” Provoked by this question, which by the way, is in my view not so ‘simple’, Cohen and AARON have gone on to develop a fairly illustrious career, generating publications and exhibitions, including some exposure at fairly reputable museums. (Pamela McCorduck published AARON’s CODE in 1990.) I understand that many of AARON’s images have been generated in physical form, that is, into the traditional flesh of two dimensional art, oil and canvas, and ink on paper. Quite how Cohen and AARON collaborate on this is unclear to me and until I can see one of these images for myself, my personal jury, in all good conscience, must remain out as to what they actually feel like, whether the images ‘work’ or not.

But Aaron is a program whose language and cultural milieu, if you will, is embodied in circuitry and chips and so on in a computer – the stuff that’s reputed to hide under the key board and just beneath my fingers as I write. Right now AARON is apparently humming and well, generating images that can be downloaded, saved and used as screen savers and the like. So by downloading some images off the internet, in fact allowing AARON to ‘spontaneously’ generate images on my screen I feel as though I’ve become familiar with him where he’s most at home. On his own turf as it were. This is one area for examination. The other is to look at what claims are made for AARON, especially by Cohen, who must in this case constitute something of AARON’s intentionality.

Let’s start then with the images that AARON ‘creates’ on my screen. Firstly he whips line across the screen-space defining shapes that become plant like, very leafy, and humanoid, very spiky. The contexts that he generated for me were almost wholly interiors with looming or retreating spaces. The line itself was jiggly in its course but evenly emphatic in its pressures. It appeared to perform with a level of self-defined virtuosity but displayed no particular curiosities, doubts, pleasures or discoveries. Next, with some efficiency, he filled in the described spaces with color, flat, unmodeled and lacking feeling. There’s no doubt that AARON’s making pictures and that he’s making these pictures by variously deploying sets of rules. These rules lead to a signature style in both the drawing and the color choices. But do pictures and style constitute anything that we might value as art – as distinct from decoration, novelty or anomaly?

“Aaron exists;” writes Cohen, “it generates objects that hold their own more than adequately, in human terms, in any gathering of similar but human produced objects….” Alas there is more slick than substance to this sentence. In any gathering of similar things, any one of those things will ‘hold their own’ because, by definition, they’re similar – QED. So this doesn’t get us anywhere, except to suggest that AARON’s images have an exportable potency available in a competitive and challenging art environment. As I’ve already said I’ve not seen AARON and Cohen’s work in traditional “flesh,” but I have seen it on the screen and, as such, it certainly holds its own with other screen savers. And this would be good if screen savers constitute, what the literary critic Harold Bloom might call, AARON’s agon. But I suspect that AARON/Cohen is courting other company and so here’s, the real question: Does an experience of AARON’s work hold its own with other sources of aesthetic engagement, digital, video, musical, literary, painterly or otherwise? Thus far the answer has to be no. AARON’s work, as it emerged on my screen has little or no aesthetic power. There’s a reason for this that’s locked up in what we mean by the words ‘thought’ and ‘intelligence.’

‘Intelligence’ is notoriously hard to define. Neuro-philosopher William Calvin in his 1996 book, How Brains Think points out that intelligence is frequently defined in terms that are too narrow. I suspect that he is here referring to the computational model, the problem solving model, the operational model (i.e. intelligence is what intelligence tests test) and so on. He also points that we’ve begun to talk more about multiple intelligences, but wonders why we need to conflate these for, he says, the big issue must be not who has intelligence and how ‘big’ is it?, but what is it?

“Some of what intelligence encompasses,” writes Calvin, “are cleverness, foresight, speed, creativity, and how many things you can juggle at once.” For my own part I would add that as we often speak of intelligence in terms of problem solving or answering questions we might also include in Calvin’s list the ability to frame and pose the right questions even when answers seem to be a long way off.

Perhaps the term ‘artificial intelligence’ is a misnomer and so misleads my lady friend into praising AARON’s intelligence when she really means that she’s awestruck by his novel computational skills. Do computations make art? Or, as Cohen puts it, “If what AARON is making is not art, what is it exactly, and in what ways, other than its origin, does it differ from the “real thing”?’ If it is not thinking, what exactly is it doing?”

There is a way of approaching these two questions together. Essentially, thinking and quality of thought lies at the heart (sic) of all art. This is not to say that all art is necessarily conceptual, but it is to say that all art is the product of a unique engagement of faculties. And these faculties are largely mental, they reside in the neural aura we speak of as consciousness - a sort of existential piazza where thinking is experienced as happening.

Very rarely, except perhaps in advanced classes of formal logic, is our thinking a stream of undiluted reason. Most frequently thinking, much messier than reason, is a theatre of half heard inner voices, mumbled dialogues, darts of insight, burglaries of meaning (a characteristic of the imagination ascribed by the philosopher William Gass), shadows of uncertainties, conservative survivalisms, parodic opportunisms, reckless self defeatisms and even intuitions, those vivid gate crashers that make the party buzz. These are both our infections and our substance. Logic only happens when all other thinking is put to rest. Reason, a cool peninsula on an otherwise glowing hotbed of coal.

AARON’s pictures differ from art, or the real thing as Cohen puts it, firstly, because they’re not that engaging to look at, and they’re not that engaging to look at because AARON doesn’t think; AARON applies logic. Some women may have learnt to run with the wolves, but AARON will always run with the algorithms. AARON, I submit, is a machine programmed to stimulate certain motions which motions in turn make pictures. AARON is a bundle of conditioned reflexes executing procedures, even procedures of apparent invention - built-in variability - but procedures nonetheless.

AARON’s pictures differ from the real thing in that they necessarily lack what all art requires: authentic and reconfigured human experience. AARON can’t think outside the box because he is his box – albeit a box of sophisticated computing tricks. For AARON to make art he’d have to read some stuff, watch a cat catch a bird, smell the tang of a loved ones thigh, caress the head of a new born child, bury a dead father.

Art is a dense concentration of thinking. Thinking is what Goya does when he lays down an ineffable grey against the head of the Duchess of Alba and puts a whispy pink bow at her breast; thinking is what Cezanne does when he delicately nuances across the canvas, multiple coordinates for his little sensations; thinking is what Emily Dickinson does when she writes: "There's a certain Slant of light,/ Winter Afternoons/That oppresses, like the Heft/ Of Cathedral Tunes--" Thinking is what jazz saxophonist Ben Webster does when he blows a phrase. And thinking is what jazz critic Whitney Balliet does when he writes of Webster’s blowing, like this, “He would start a medium –slow blues solo very softly with a weaving five note phrase, pause, play a high, barely audible blue note, and duck back to his opening phrase, still as soft as first sunlight. He would harden his tone slightly at the start of his next chorus, issue an annunciatory phrase, repeat it, insert a defiant tremolo…His tone would grow hard, he would growl and crowd his notes, he would shake his phrases as if he had them clamped in his teeth…..As the years went by…. He would close certain phrase endings by allowing his vibrato to melt into pure undulating breath – dramatically offering, before the breath expired, the ghost of his sound.”

Art, at its best, strives for intense and rare person to person experience. The richer the one the richer the other and of course the dialogue between them (vide Balliet). AARON may be one smart program, but his presence as a person, let alone an artist, is not much in evidence.

Ricky Burnett is an artist, curator, teacher, art critic and author. He has exhibited in London, Germany and South Africa. He helped found and taught at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, and taught at the University of the Witwatersrand. Today he runs an art studio in Washington State and guest lectures at Evergreen State College.