Casey Reas: The Thing that Makes the Thing is More Interesting than the Thing

Rather than getting hung up on the technology itself, it’s worth thinking about how it works on us. The effectiveness of a generative artwork has a lot to do with the medium of its output. A single still image, for instance, affects us differently from a song, and they’re both different from a movie. That’s where Eno’s idea about the human brain “c... See more

Now that we have abstracted technique away from the artistic process, can we build interfaces between the creators of ideas and the machines of technique in a way that allows the creators to “make it new”? That’s what we really want from creativity: something that didn’t exist and couldn’t have existed, before.

When Victor designs a software interface, he doesn’t do it to deliver functionality — he does it to advance an argument, in much the same way that 20th-century utopian architectural designs were never really intended as functional building plans. Victor’s UI demos are primarily manifestos on the sorry state of computer-assisted thought, framed with... See more

First comes the awe: can you believe this? Look at this video of a man running backwards on a treadmill!

Then, the panic: given art's decidedly specific turn to "man in sweats running backwards on treadmill" motifs, will art as we know it become obsolete?

Absolutely not.

Culture, or Art, is the response to society. The deviation.

C. THI NGUYEN: Value capture cases are cases in which you have rich, subtle, maybe inchoate values or you’re in the process of making them. And then you enter something in the world and the world offers you a simple, pre-established, already standardized, incorporated into a technology simple version of that value system.

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-... See more