Миметическое искусство, пустота и ИИ
Размышления о том, что происходит сейчас с мимесимом в искусстве, натолкнули нашего редактора Аню Знаенок на написание целого развернутого эссе для AICA (International Association of Art Critics). В нем Аня размышляет о том состоянии, в котором искусство оказалось сегодня, в эпоху постгуманизма, и какую роль играет ИИ в нем.
Полная версия эссе на русском языке на сайте syg.ma
Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds
John: 12:24
Recent act regarding AI that was adopted by EU Parliament marked the first formal attempt to legally regulate artificial intelligence. The Artificial Intelligence Act is supposed to establishe a common regulatory and legal framework for AI within the European Union and comes into force on 1 August 2024, with provisions being enforced progressively over the following 6 to 36 months. As we observe governments for the first time in history attempting to regulate and control AI, artists are enthusiastically exploring new fields for research and creativity. Within the production chain and the adaptation of algorithms, artists (like other representatives of the humanities) play a crucial role in testing and “humanizing” the outcomes.
Posthumanism has become one of the most comprehensible and relevant concepts of our time. Over the past decades, amid rapid technological development, the mechanization of processes and phenomena, virtualization, and digitalization, we have been reassessing the concept of humanity and what it means to be human. Many mid-20th-century dystopias that predicted a future where humanity would confront machines now seem closer than we might have imagined.
Michel Foucault writes: “…the end of man (…) is the return of the beginning of philosophy. It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.” [Foucault 1977, 373]. Considering that posthumanism largely inherits Foucault’s ideas, we can acknowledge his premise that we are currently living in a state of particular emptiness, of ‘emptiness’ and ‘nothingness’. According to the principles of posthumanism, today's void exists beyond any binary oppositions: human – non-human, male – female, culture – nature, humanism – anti-humanism. So what is this limbo in which we find ourselves, and in which new thinking is inevitably unfolding? And does this void actually exist?
I would argue that we are in a sort of buffer zone, the duration of which is unknown. The next year, three, or ten years—given the rapidly changing nature of both personal and social time—will determine how humanity interacts with AI in the long term. Artists, writers, and authors are special agents of social change, taking the first and most significant impact. Just as it once happened with the testing of new chemical compounds in paints, then with photography and cinematography, today artists are testing AI.
However, in defining the particular state in which we currently find ourselves, I am more aligned with Boris Groys’s idea that “contemporary civilization is a civilization in which nothingness has disappeared.” This thought was articulated by Boris Groys in a dialogue with Anton Khitrov, published in e-flux [Groys & Khitrov, 2022]. In this conversation, Groys discusses with Khitrov the legacy of his friend Ilya Kabakov:
“At the time when Kabakov was engaged with garbage, he had in mind (…) that everything humans create goes into the garbage, that all human activity, including art, is meaningless. A person works, dies, and then relatives or acquaintances throw everything that remains of the person into the trash, including pictures and everything else. For the most part, all lives end this way. For Kabakov, the garbage disappeared into nothingness, it went god knows where. But with the growth of environmental consciousness, it became clear that garbage does not disappear into a void.”
Groys discusses all this in the context of art and Kabakov’s practices (fig.1) , but it is also highly relevant to today’s phenomena related to AI, particularly deep learning, as well as the digitization and computerization of art and culture in general. Nothing disappears without a trace anymore, as everything is recorded, accumulated, and processed online. In 2023, approximately 120 zettabytes (ZB) of information were created worldwide, which amounts to about 337,080 petabytes (PB) of data per day. Every individual leaves a digital trace—a cultural artifact in a virtual settlement. Information that enters the internet, including photographs, personal snapshots on social media, images of cultural heritage, and texts, becomes part of the data used to train AI algorithms (deep learning). Swedish political scientist Carl Öhman extensively developed the idea of a post-mortal world and how people, upon their death, leave behind vast amounts of information online in his book The Afterlife of Data (2024). How to limit these processes and prevent certain types of information from being used is another question and remains a challenge for legislation; these issues, among others, fall within the domain of copyright law and confidentiality. Thus, everything, both in the physical and digital worlds, is processed, reborn, and transformed into something new. The rule of three Rs has migrated from environmental agendas to a pervasive ideology: recycle, reuse, reduce. I would add other Rs—rethink, reflect, review—to this list.
If we consider Foucault’s notion of void in today’s context, this emptiness did not emerge out of nowhere but rather from the crisis of modernity, in which space and time have ceased to be orderly categories. The absence of structural certainty and norms is a result of the shift from traditional disciplinary mechanisms to new forms of control and regulation, where former systems of meaning and knowledge are threatened and lose their previous significance. Today’s crisis is often characterized by the absence of new artistic movements. Since the late 20th and early 21st centuries, new artistic movements have become less distinct. While the 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed a vibrant growth of new movements—from Impressionism to Postmodernism—the past few decades have seen this dynamic slow considerably.
Contemporary art manifests itself through the synthesis and intersection of existing styles and disciplines. Globalization and the availability of information lead to the mixing of ideas, and an interdisciplinary approach complicates the clear delineation of new directions. Instead of radically creating new movements, artists are reinterpreting existing forms and currents. Scott Reyburn, in his article for The Art Newspaper, reflecting on the disappearance of all the ‘-isms’ in contemporary art, subtly poses the question: is the art market the most powerful movement of the 21st century?
Speaking about synthesis and interdisciplinarity, it is worth noting that some artists actively use AI for processing, collaging, and other digital manipulations of images, subsequently transferring the results onto canvas using traditional techniques, such as oil or acrylic painting. Among these authors are contemporary artists Varvara Stern (b. 1986) and Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy (b.1999). Interestingly, despite their use of digital technologies, they retain traditional painting methods, such as brush and paints, complex layering technique in case of Ster (fig.2), or, in the case of Guarnera-MacCarthy, airbrush (fig.3). This approach allows them to maintain the dominant human aspect in their practice: selecting suitable options and making adjustments require artistic intuition, knowledge, skills, and mastery of technique.
If I were pessimistic, I would say that this is precisely what the death of mimetic art looks like. Artists are no longer imitating reality per se—they are imitating reality as processed by artificial intelligence. And that is an entirely different story. Posthumanist mimesis, as a phenomenon, has already emerged as a distinct field of study and is examined by researchers such as N. Katherine Hayles and Nidesh Lawtoo. However, I am optimistic, and moreover, mimetic art has already been declared dead many times before, as seen in the developments in art during the 20th century.
In his book Art and Illusion, E.H. Gombrich [Gombrich 1960, 182]. recounts a dialogue between Apollonius of Tyana (1st century CE) and his student Damis, recorded by Philostratus. Agreeing that painting is an art of imitation, or mimesis, Apollonius asks his teacher:
“…But what about the things we see in the sky when the clouds are drifting, the centaurs and stag antelopes and wolves and horses? Are they also works of imitation? Is God a painter who uses his leisure hours to amuse himself in that way?” No, the two agree, these cloud shapes have no meaning in themselves, they arise by pure chance; it is we who by nature are prone to imitation and articulate these clouds. “But does this not mean,” probes Apollonius, “that the art of imitation is twofold? One aspect of it is the use of hands and mind in producing imitations, another aspect the producing of likenesses with the mind alone?” The mind of the beholder also has its share in the imitation.”
Today, imitation involves not only the human mind but also artificial intelligence. Artists now “filter” results through the lens of human experience and perception. Deep learning technology, which trains AI models, functions as a network of billions of neurons simulating the structure of the human brain. This network can assimilate trillions of patterns in a short time and generate responses based on them. Similarly, our human brain accumulates, absorbs, and gathers information throughout life. An artist’s brain, in turn, collects visual and sensory images, transforming them into unique works of art. This process parallels how AI learns from data, but with one crucial difference: the human brain adds subjective experiences and cultural contexts, creating something more than just an algorithmic outcome. Artists use AI-generated results as new tools for creativity, enriching them with their experience, emotional responses, and intuition. In this way, artificial intelligence becomes not only an imitator but also a source of inspiration for new forms of art, merging technology and human experience in a unified creative process. Notably, artist Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy, who incorporates AI into his practice, downplays his own significance as an artist. In his artist statement, he says that “the digital environment takes on the form of a divine power.”
In his book Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (2022), Nidesh Lawtoo explores how we might reassess the importance of mimesis in the contemporary era. He argues that Plato’s allegory, although ancient, anticipates our modern world of simulations and that postmodern critics may have too hastily dismissed the connection between this world of simulations and the issue of mimesis without properly considering it. Discussing the hyperreal world of simulacra and urging a reconsideration of the laws of imitation from a transdisciplinary perspective, he writes: “In fact, hyperreal simulations disconnected from the logic of representation have the performative power to retroact on the plastic brains and porous bodies of homo mimeticus via feedback loops that blur the line between truth and lies, origins and copies, facts and alternative facts, digital simulations and embodied imitations, generating shadows that are far removed from reality indeed; and yet, they can also performatively induce deeply felt, false, and intoxicating beliefs that trigger contagious actions that are socially pathological and are endowed with the immanent power to amplify viral contagion in real life.” [Lawtoo 2022, 287].
This statement is intriguing because Nidesh Lawtoo places contemporary processes within both posthumanist and postmodernist discourses simultaneously. The concept of ‘viral contagion’ in our context refers to the rapid pace of globalized processes, such as the development of new technologies and the digitization of art. An example of such processes is the recent surge in widespread interest in blockchain technologies among artists, followed by the boom in AI-generated art (e.g., Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Jasper Art). As a result, boundaries of identity and authenticity are blurred, raising new questions in the realms of ethics, morality, and copyright. A trans- and interdisciplinary approach in art will help address the problems and dilemmas at the forefront today. It will primarily aid in identifying and highlighting the most pressing issues for subsequent solution-seeking.
Researchers often use terms such as ‘technophobia’ [see Nestik, Zhuravlev, Szabo, Baturina, Pelloso Piurcosky, Ferreira, & Patrakov, 2022] and ‘algorithmophobia,’ in response to negative attitude to techological introduction. In turn, critics and opponents of AI in art strive to maintain the ‘purity’ of human-created works as much as possible, with increasing instances of artists being disqualified from competitions for using AI. However, radical attempts to avoid and ban any technological infiltration into art are, firstly, impractical and, secondly, irrational. We are only at the initial stage of AI development, analogous to the early days of photography. AI should be viewed as a tool that assists artists and creative professionals in the decision-making process rather than as an independent creator. Perhaps revising the term ‘artificial intelligence’ to ‘augmented intelligence’ would underscore the idea that AI is designed to enhance and expand the human creative process, not replace it. The principle of ‘human first’ should remain fundamental: all systems should be developed to serve people, not the other way around. By keeping this in mind, we are more likely to resolve dilemmas and challenges in the realms of (post)mimesis and (post)humanism.
Thus, artificial intelligence, by copying reality and absorbing information, shows a remarkable similarity to the human brain. This analogy highlights that the process of accumulating data and transforming it into new forms is a shared characteristic of both humans and machines. However, despite this, Foucault’s assertion of a void where new thoughts arise seems irrelevant in the contemporary world. In our hyperreal and information-saturated society, the void no longer exists in the sense Foucault meant. Instead, we live in an era where everything is recorded, analyzed, and processed.
What, then, is the future of mimetic art? We are likely to witness further integration of AI into artistic processes, where the boundaries between the artificial and the human will blur even more. Artists will continue to use AI as a tool, enriching its output with their experience and emotional perception. Mimetic art continues to evolve and adapt to new conditions. And while some artists are already imitating reality processed by artificial intelligence, this does not signify the end of mimesis but rather a new phase, where humans and machines work in creative tandem. Such interaction opens new horizons for art. In this new world, where there is no place for a void, art will continue to evolve, remaining an essential means of expressing and exploring our shared reality.
Text by Anya Znaenok
European Parliament. (2024, March 8). Artificial Intelligence Act: MEPs adopt landmark law. Retrieved from https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240308IPR19015/artificial-intelligence-act-meps-adopt-landmark-law, a
Report Edge Delta. (2024, March 11). How much data is created per day. Retrieved from https://edgedelta.com/company/blog/how-much-data-is-created-per-day, accessed 1 August 2024.
see Scott Reyburn (2021, December 2). Have we reached the end of -isms?, The Art Newspaper. Retrieved from https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/12/02/have-we-reached-the-end-of-isms, accessed 28 July 2024
Mimesis (from Ancient Greek μίμησις, meaning ‘imitation’) is one of the fundamental principles of classical aesthetics, proclaiming the primary goal of art to be the imitation of reality.cessed 27 July 2024.
See Mattia Guarnera-McCarthy, quoted from ‘Artist statement’. Available at mattiaguarnera-maccarthy.com/artist-statement, accessed 15th June 2024.
Psychological Phenomenon: Theoretical Analysis in Interação - Revista de Ensino, Pesquisa e Extensão (2018). 20. 10.33836/interacao.v20i1.191.
Bibliography
Nidesh Lawtoo, “The Age of Viral Reproduction,” in Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (Leuven University Press, 2022): 277-300, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv32r02kw.12, 287
Nidesh Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis I: Concepts for the Mimetic Turn” in Journal of Posthumanism, 2.2 (2022): 101-115
Ernst Hans Gombrich. Art and illusion; a study in the psychology of pictorial representation, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 182
N. Katherine Hayles and Nidesh Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis II—Connections: A Dialogue between Nidesh Lawtoo and Katherine Hayles’ in Journal of Posthumanism, 2.2 (2022): 181-191
Carl Öhman, The Afterlife of Data (University of Chicago Press, 2024): 200
Boris Groys, Anton Khitrov, No order makes any sense: A conversation on Ilya Kabakov. e-flux. Journal 139. (2022). Retrieved from https://www.e-flux.com/journal/139/559898/no-order-makes-any-sense-a-conversation-on-ilya-kabakov/, accessed 2 August 2024
Tim Nestik & Anatoly Zhuravlev & Csilla Szabo & Lioudmila Baturina & Fabricio Pelloso Piurcosky & Jeferson Ferreira & Eduard Patrakov. Technophobia as a Cultural and Thus, Roland Barthes’ concept of the Death of the Author is experiencing a new phase of revival.
Images
Fig.1. Ilya Kabakov, Box with Garbage, 1986. View of installation in Moscow studio. Courtesy of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.
Fig. 2. Varvara Stern, Richard Lives for a One Day, Day№5. 2023 (work in progress). Сanvas, paint pigments, oil, acrylic.150х150х4 cm. Courtesy of Varvara Stern.
Fig. 3. Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy, Just a Scratch, 2024, 45x35 cm, airbrush acrylic on canvas (exh. Tube Gallery, Palma, 2024). Photo courtesy of Natasha Lebedeva
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