32. Art, AI, auteurs, access, annual audio
Matthäus Greuter, Kort over Rom med de syv pilgrimskirker, 1634-1638, Statens Museum Kunst, Denmark. Public domain.
This last weekend, R and I were playing around with Nick Walton’s AI Dungeon 2, a lovely piece of programming that uses OpenAI’s 124M parameter GPT-2 model to generate infinite interactive text adventures based on a large language training set. R has been using it to explore increasingly weird scenarios for his D&D dungeon mastering. But I thought it might be interesting to give it a contemporary art museum setting, a couple of current topics, and see what happened.
Here’s the transcript.
[My inputted characters, purpose, and context]
You are a museum worker in a famous art museum in New York. You are trying to for a union in your workplace and bring justice to the workplace. You enter the museum and see a curator arguing with an artist. The artist has taped a banana to the wall and is calling it art.
[Automatically generated text starts here]
The curator says that this is not art, but the artist responds by saying that he is just doing what all artists do and that you should listen to him because he knows more about art than you do
> buy art.
“I’m going to buy art!” you exclaim. “But I don’t have any money! What am I supposed to do?”
The curator looks at you and smiles.
> ask curator for help.
“Can you get me some of this stuff? It’s expensive”.
The curator nods his head and points to a painting on the wall. He then goes over to another painting and picks up a small vase
> take vase and break it.
You pick up the vase and smash it on the floor. The pieces of broken glass fly everywhere, but fortunately nobody is hurt.
“Wow, that was really cool”.
> shred painting.
You grab the brush and start to draw on the painting. The painter stares at you with an expression of shock.
> talk to painter.
“Hey, can you make me a copy of this picture so I can have one of my own?”
The painter nods his head in agreement and starts to paint something else. You look around and see other paintings being done as well
> take painting to art fair.
You walk over to the painting and start tearing it apart. You tear off parts of the painting until you are left with nothing but a piece of paper. You put your new painting on top of the rest of the paintings and leave.
> go to art fair.
You enter the art fair and find yourself in a room full of people. There are lots of booths here, each selling different types of art. Most of them are paintings though, which makes sense since they’re the most valuable
> examine booth.
There are several booths here, all of which sell paintings. Some of them are more expensive than others, but none of them are worth much. You notice a woman standing near the entrance. She seems like she has some sort of connection to the fair, or maybe she just likes art
> talk to woman.
You approach the woman and begin talking to her. She seems very interested in what you have to say. She tells you about herself and how she came to be here. You learn that she used to work at a gallery before she got fired
> ask woman about the gallery.
“Oh yeah, I used to work there… I think”.
> go to the gallery.
You walk towards the gallery and see that it’s closed. You try to call out to the woman again, but she doesn’t answer. You decide to give up and return home.
> use telephone to call the curator.
You dial the phone number on the wall and wait patiently. A man answers the phone. He seems to know who you are, but he says he can’t tell you anything about the fair because he’s not allowed to speak to anyone under penalty of death.
> ask for secret information about art.
“I want to know everything about art. How do you create something like this? What materials do you use? Where does it come from? Why did you choose this artist for this commission? And why would you fire someone if you didn’t like their work?”
> listen to man.
“Well, first of all, I can’t tell you anything about the fair because I’m not allowed to speak to anyone under penalty of death”.
> ask about fair.
“What kind of fair is it? Do you mean a fair where people trade things?”
> trade art with man.
“Okay, I’ll trade you this painting for a bottle of wine”.
> take wine.
You take the wine and drink it. After drinking it, you feel sick and vomit it back up. You cough up blood and fall unconscious.
> wake up and question the state of contemporary art, capitalism, and the 155 super wealthy individuals who make up the collecting class.
After waking up, you realize that you’ve been given a gift by the devil. You wonder if you should accept this gift or not.
> accept gift.
You accept the gift and throw the painting into the trashcan. You then turn your attention to the painting. You stare at it for awhile and then toss it aside.
(If you’d like to continue that stem, then ‘load 88a9773e-1959-11ea-bef1-0242ac1c000’)
It turns out that given a few inputs, AI Dungeon 2 can give off a semblance of an understanding of the art world, contemporary art practice, and even the connection between Maurizio Cattelan and Ai Wei Wei. Except it doesn’t actually ‘know’ any of these connections, it is simply generating text output based on its training data. This gives enough inputs to make it ‘sound about right’. Even a quick read of its output reveals the inherent biases - the curator is a woman, the artist is a man, the gallery owner is a man - and contextual limitations of its training dataset - it sounds plausible, but definitely not different/remarkable. Nevertheless, as far as a text adventure goes, its quite good and amusing!
Creator Nick Walton tweeted that the project is currently costing US$10K per day to operate - costs currently covered by Brigham Young University’s Perception, Control, Cognition Lab. He’s now running a Patreon to try to keep the servers up publicly.
(For more on the pleasures of text adventures, I wrote a whole episode on them back in #15 including a handmade one I whipped up for you to play)
Moving on to less whimsical matters.
It has been a very interesting year watching (from a distance) art museum staff in the US (re)discover unions en masse. I’ve been reading young UK activist Nathalie Olah’s short book Steal As Much As You Can - How To Win The Culture Wars In An Age Of Austerity (2019), which (amongst many things) explicitly looks at class in contemporary British politics and culture, and the terrible hangover of the Blair years, and now Tory austerity. Olah’s book looks at how class, especially, has been rediscovered by younger people - along with other overlapping social identities and power relations. But I digress.
The US has many weaknesses and one of its key blind spots is around class. And so it was interesting to read a republished article from Art Forum from the early 1970s which discusses early efforts at unionizing around that time at MOMA, Whitney, and elsewhere.
“Such a pattern [of unionization] is one that class-affiliated trustees and their directors may resist in some of the ways discussed above, but what they should be doing is figuring out how to work with a decisive new force in the knowledge industry. It is, moreover, a force with the authority and vigor of broad social change behind it, the organization of white-collar workers. This is the inevitable development of an information-based culture, and as such, it cannot be contained by expedient concessions and malicious delays.”
And from Mieke Gerritzen & Geert Lovink, 2018 Amsterdam Design Manifesto [PDF],
We all know that art has never been autonomous. There have always been clients. Both art and design were – and still are – made to a large extent on commission. Art is meant to provide meaning and reflection in museums, galleries and art fairs. Design, on the other hand, is made by the industry to be sold in shops, online or offline. But these outlets, be they gallery or shop, have grown ever more alike in the past decades. Museums increasingly have become environments in which we shop for emotional impressions and art paraphernalia. Galleries have entered into competition with the retail sector, racking up substantially higher visitor numbers. Biennials have seamlessly merged with city promotion, and art fairs, of course, have been markets all along. Both design and art have become ensnared in a straitjacket of regulations and control, including monitoring of target audiences and marketing targets. As a result, their outlets have become increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other.
At a moment when the (Australian) Federal Government has axed the term ‘arts’ from its portfolios things feel somewhat grim but perhaps also galvanising. (Esther Anatolitis has been a great spokesperson for the community in recent days if you’re an overseas reader wondering what I talking about). In Victoria we have a Minister for the Creative Industries, Creative Victoria, and are part of a super department called Jobs, Precincts, and Regions - but despite no mention of ‘arts’ in department titles, Victoria has by far the strongest direct and indirect government support for the ‘arts’ right up to the personal support of the Minister. So it’s not so much the removal of the name at the federal level that is galling, it’s that the removal of the term is just the next step for this conservative Federal Government - arts and culture is collateral damage. Cool and normal, right?
Pia Andrews has written an excellent piece on working in the public sector - and the services that a properly functioning and properly funded one might deliver for communities. How we get to her vision is the challenge - and as she points out, we don’t get there by blindly adopting ‘business practices’.
“Working in the public sector is complex, difficult and has wide ranging impacts on society in everything we do. We have a public good imperative that doesn’t always align with a business imperative, and myriad (appropriate) accountability measures that try to safeguard the rights, dignity and safety of the people and communities we serve. We are different to businesses — and we should be proud of it.”
With that in mind, I had a great chat with Gill Nicol from the MCA in Sydney on the recent Hong Kong sojourn in which we talked about collection digitization. We talked around the challenge of digitization leaving museums with some ‘nice new digital images and some updated metadata’, but not a lot else. It goes without saying that these digital objects are nothing more than raw materials - raw materials awaiting someone else to use, repurpose, reorder, recontextualise them - just as we would expect an exhibition designer and curator to use objects and media to tell and evoke new stories. The challenge is then to enable re-use, not only by liberal licensing and open access models, but also by actively working with communities over a long period of time to encourage re-appropriation.
Indigo Holcombe-James has published her PhD on the use of digital/online cultural collections. Her thesis explores how people use online resources made by the GLAM sector, and how these are framed by cultural policy.
While it has long been acknowledged that the cultural sector makes choices between publics, that these choices extend into the digital has been underscrutinised. By providing a detailed account of two field sites where distinct choices were made between which digital and non-digital publics participated and how, this research challenges the dominant Australian cultural policy narrative: to what extent can – or should – cultural policy account for the dynamics of digital participation? In asserting that through digital participation distance will be mediated and collections unlocked, Creative Nation (Department of Communications and the Arts, 1994) and Creative Australia (Australian Government, 2013) establish the context to which the cultural sector responds. By disregarding the extensive body of digital participation literature, these policies ensure barriers to digital participation remain, responses to these barriers are divergent and have exclusionary outcomes, with stark consequences for the Australian cultural sector’s inclusivity and accessibility.
She explores this by looking at non-use, cultural barriers to use, and focuses on several important Australian resources. Her recommendations are broadly internationally applicable and as I read the thesis I was struck by how poor the GLAM sector is at actually understanding user/community behaviors - or the ways in which their actions are framed by policy. Holcombe-James’ work is important reading for everyone involved in designing, making and delivering collections online and working on ‘engaging’ people in and around these archival resources. Her work exposes some deep structural challenges around expanding the audience - the ‘users’ - of these resources, and the naivety (of which I’ve been as guilt as anyone) of earlier attempts to give our collections greater “reach and impact”. You could easily do a re-reading of the successes and failures of Europeana or many open access projects through Holcombe-James’ lens and discover new ways forward.
After a few concurrent very late nights, I have finally finished Death Stranding - 37 hours and 54 minutes in total! It’s been a long time - maybe twenty years - since I’ve played a game where the compulsion to uncover ‘what happens next’ has been met with a genuine ‘oh I totally did not expect that’. If anything, it’s an ‘arthouse videogame’, heavy on metaphorical social commentary, but ambiguous and at times still very strange. It’s very much an auteur work - Hideo Kojima’s stamp is everywhere - with an enormous budget and production crew - and yet it is a spectacular, thoughtful, and thought provoking experience. It is graphically stunning, the music and sound works together elegantly, and manages to be ‘cinematic’ without falling into the typical action movie plot that most supposedly ‘cinematic’ videogames do. It is not necessarily ‘fun’ to play - at its heart it is a ‘gig economy delivery worker simulator’, and for a game that foregrounds social bonds, it is very much designed for the single player to play alone. This felt much like an arthouse film might be expected to be watched alone in a mostly empty cinema (versus the communal blockbuster movie with a raucous cinema crowd cheering alongside you). And despite its title, and themes of loss and trauma, technology and modernist expansionism, care and decay, its a very hopeful and hope-inducing game.
(If you’ve also got to the end of Death Stranding then you’ll probably be horrified by this latest announcement from Microsoft proclaiming an age of ‘planetary computing’ …)
I got asked to write a couple of words for the office ‘games round up of 2019’. which will probably be online in the next few days.
What comes next – over tens of hours – continues to be unexpected, and even once you get into the more mechanised sections of the game – vehicles and automated delivery bots – the game continues to draw heavily on its physical mechanics for impact. It’s been a long time – maybe twenty years – since I’ve played a game that so relied on the haptic rumble of the controller to communicate and evoke stress, distress, weight, lack of balance, and friction. When the rumble in the original Playstation controller was first released in the 1990s it quickly became a gimmick that game designers shied away from, but in Death Stranding the haptic feedback is so critical to the nuance and impact of the parcel delivery grind, let alone the other terrors that need to be shaken off as the game wears on.
As Queensland games academic Brendan Keogh tweeted the other day, “the thing about you’re interested in [with videogames] probably isn’t actually ‘narrative’”.
In the latest issue of ROMChip - an online journal of writing about games - there’s a good history of ‘force feedback’ in game controller design if you want to go deeper into the haptic feedback wormhole - something that has lessons for those designing ‘multi-sensorial’ experiences. Here’s a short piece on the beautiful cartography of old videogame maps now impossible given the vast size and/or the generative nature of videogame levels.
I’ve come to a view that the best contemporary videogames are a type of art that you sit with, sit inside, interact with, intently for a long time. They are intensely durational. Completing Untitled Goose Game (2019) is easily as long as reading a novel (5 hours) and Death Stranding (2019), excluding side paths, sit at around 40 hours. Given the time a museum visitor typically spends in front of a work of art, this feels important.
A quick pivot to some musical recommendations.
I’ve done a short list of recommended music as part of the annual Cyclic Defrost ‘Best of the Year’ thing. The writing pool, as the magazine reaches into its 21st year, keeps shrinking but the breadth of recommendations conversely expands. Dale Harrison and I started Cyclic Defrost way back in 1998 then on the urging of Marcus Westbury turned the zine into a properly ‘Australia Council supported’ print magazine in 2000. That domain name has been registered for a very long time!
Here’s a couple of end of year special Bandcamp deals you might be interested in. Ambient composer Rafael Anton Irisarri has made his whole back catalogue ‘pay what you want’ as part of a strike against Spotify’s end of year algorithmic activities, reducing music to a series of likes. He has made some stunning music and this is a nice open door to his catalogue. Feel free to pay more than zero.
Irisarri has also recently released a new album on Brisbane label Room40 and Lawrence English, who runs Room40, has made his label’s whole back catalogue 50% off with ‘slaythedecade’ on the Room40 Bandcamp. There’s some very fine records, if you’re looking for where to start from the 2019 releases, Ai Yamamoto, John Chantler, Rafael Toral are all good places to start. (Hopefully that code is still working by the time you read this email!)
In another 50%-off move, Berlin-based producer Deadbeat has put his entire back catalogue - including his very recently released drone tribute to Melbourne’s sorely missed Alan Bamford - on sale at 50% with this code ‘xmas2019’. There’s plenty of excellent deep dubby techno waiting for your ears. His Wax Poetic For Our Great Resolve (2018) was one of my favourites of last year, and his trilogy of early albums for ~Scape in the early 00s are a good place to start too.
And, while we’re on the topic of futuristic dub, here’s one small short music video/micro-doco to watch from/about the excellent young Jamaican producers Equiknoxx - Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair, Nick “Bobby Blackbird” Deane, and Jordan “Time Cow” Chung. Oscillating between Kingston and Manchester, they’ve put out some scintillating records over the past couple of years, but this video captures them at play in Kingston.
Because we began with machine generated words, let’s end with one of the best albums of the year, Caterina Barbieri’s Ecstatic Computation (2019) - some very fine modular synthesis - the sound of machines coaxed into life, machine generated sounds.
Until next time I welcome your comments and emails, be safe, go dancing, make some noise!
Seb
PPS - This post is full of links. Which you’d know if you clicked them. But I’ve collated them all here in case you want to cut and paste them to your browser instead because then they won’t activate the tracking codes.
https://open.smk.dk/artwork/image/KKSgb9930/4
https://colab.research.google.com/github/nickwalton/AIDungeon/blob/master/AIDungeon_2.ipynb
twitter.com/nickwalton00/status/1203370250030350338
https://www.patreon.com/AIDungeon
https://sebchan.substack.com/p/15-on-text-adventures
https://playfic.com/games/sebchan/text-adventuring-in-nyc
https://repeaterbooks.com/product/steal-as-much-as-you-can-how-to-win-the-culture-wars-in-an-age-of-austerity/
https://www.artforum.com/print/197502/museums-and-unionization-37308
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/dec/06/lumping-the-arts-portfolio-in-with-infrastructure-is-retrograde-and-unimaginative
https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/amsterdam_design_manifesto.pdf
youtube.com/watch?v=shBwf97O7zk
https://www.themandarin.com.au/121015-new-public-management-the-practical-challenges-remedies-and-alternatives/
http://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit:162925
twitter.com/brkeogh/status/1202423265114775552
https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal/article/view/86
https://innovation.microsoft.com/a-planetary-computer-for-earth/
http://retromash.com/2018/06/20/the-beauty-of-retro-video-game-maps/
https://www.cyclicdefrost.com/2019/12/cyclic-defrost-best-of-2019/
https://irisarri.bandcamp.com/
https://room40.bandcamp.com/
https://blkrtz.bandcamp.com/
https://blkrtz.bandcamp.com/album/the-saint-of-smiths-gully
https://blkrtz.bandcamp.com/album/wax-poetic-for-this-our-great-resolve
https://blkrtz.bandcamp.com/album/lps-2002-2005
youtube.com/watch?v=hZseeK8cjWQ
https://editionsmego.bandcamp.com/album/ecstatic-computation