Abstract
In Kant’s aesthetic judgement, our faculties enable us to transcend the empirical realm of cause and effect, and perceive beautiful things with freedom of the mind through both intuition of imagination and understanding of conceptualization. It is the synthesis of a sensory intuition under our conceptual cognitive judgment that makes the aesthetic experience possible. Abstract artist Manuel Felguerez was one of the earliest artists experimenting with artificial intelligence in creating new art-making method though the computer. In 1975, he began to create his cybernetic art at the Laboratory for Computer and Graphics and Spatial Analysis at Harvard University. He gave over a thousand numerical instructions to an IBM 370/168 computer to translate data into computer drawings, then edited the results and reinserted them into the computer to regenerate drawings. Through multiple processes, he created a series of projects named “the Aesthetic Machine”. This research analyzes Felguerez’s project that foreshadowed generative and AI-based art through his methodology in iterative process of rule-definition, randomization, and selection. His method reflected the logic of today’s machine learning and became a landmark in the global history of art and technology. He bridged between the rational and the emergent, challenging the Romantic notion of the artist-genius by proposing a distributed authorship between human and system, meanwhile, reasserted the ethical and interpretive dimension of aesthetic judgment – the artist as both mediator and master of the machine.
Presenters
Yong HuangAssociate Professor, Architecture, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
AI Aesthetics, Kant's Aesthetic Judgment, Art Making Process with AI
