The Brooklyn Rail

What is drawing? It seems so obvious until I notice that it applies to personal sketches, completed artworks, diagrams, watercolors, and some softwares. It is a fundamental practice, but dismissed in the historical hierarchy of the arts as the simplest form, and so low value. It’s deeply personal, but a professional necessity.

Occasionally, some thing hits. Perhaps for being just the right amount of caffeinated, or the light streaming through the window in just the right way, or seeing something after a tiring day … this thing resonates. For lack of a better word, we call it art. And once that happens, all hell breaks loose.

In her first published book, Private I: A Memoir, we meet Hershman Leeson the child who didn’t speak until she was seven, Hershman Leeson the fast-maturing sister who regularly sought refuge in the Cleveland Art Museum as a way to escape her volatile home life, and Hershman Leeson the “gifted-child” who once cut off her own hair intending to fashion a paintbrush that would let her “paint like [J.M.W.] Turner” after discovering his work.

Artists’ recent approaches to machinic agents showcase the designed attributes of different systems. Artist and environmental engineer Tega Brain wisely pointed me towards the Critical Engineering Manifesto (2011–21), written by Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, and Danja Vasiliev, which offers a guide for how creative misuse can help us resist totalitarian systems.

Just like the mind is not a computer, memory is so much more than information. By all accounts, memory includes forgetting, as well as the ability to recall. There is a danger in our frailty, the ease with which history gets reshaped or erased. At the same time, it’s in the certainty of this uncertainty that how and what we piece together matters.

What might we gather in looking and thinking more carefully? As we proceed with vital concerns for our planet, global and immediate communities, and the arts in all their forms, a critical engagement with AI may disclose ideas and practices for other causes that matter to us.

Though much of the work I will encounter in Japan has been described to me or identified in various articles as nostalgic, I found the term disorienting.

Last month, I ended this column on an argument made by the philosopher Jennifer Corns that agency may be best served when we consider our various agentive forms. Thinking in multiples challenges us because it presents different perspectives, and so requires considering assorted contexts. This moment around generative “AI” has some artists trying to express how “artificial intelligence” is not a single thing, and how it is a medium of quantities.

Posthumanist theories, science and technology studies, and social constructivism have argued for the way in which one is never isolated and independent, but a being influenced by and influencing an environment. So what kind of agency is possible regarding the climate crisis or generative AI? 

Eno isn’t one film, but many, and the viewer’s response is complicated by this iterability; now in its fourth generation, change is part of its discourse. The nature of digital is to make variation and modularity possible. A generative film takes advantage of that quality.