In 2018, was announced the auction of the so-called first painting created by an artificial intelligence (AI) which opens the debate of the status of such algorithms in art: could we talk about art without artists? Could an AI be an artist?
The solution is complex, and one possibility would be to consider these algorithms as procedural tools which is the main purpose of The Divine Anomaly.
These algorithms are autopoietic systems capable of producing and generating, by themselves, forms, figures and any artefacts that is immanent to their nature. However, none of its creations could be considered as an artwork, since the latter needs an external intention which would make it come under the techné that ancient Greeks consider to be the nature of art, unlike the praxis that refers to the simple production.
This implicates that the autopoietic system of AI should be part of a more complex system of poiesis that includes the artist. The artist should pervert the algorithm, which means that he distorts its primary function. He does so with full knowledge of the algorithm’s imperfections and its function to be the most accurate to its ‘learning library’ which is no longer forms and figures, but rather strings of code. The artist is thus capable of recognising the anomaly that occurs and place it in the heart of his art.
To recognise the anomaly amounts to recognise the transformation of norms and forms in the perspective of becoming extraordinary. To make the anomaly a monster, that is to say something to mostrare (in Latin), amounts to recognise the existence of new beings, of new types of sensitive… of proposing a new reality.
The Divine Anomaly aims to recognise such proposals of new, extraordinary realities either by artworks that redo ancient artefacts based on the beauty as the divine unity – which is the case of Egor Kraft’s Content Aware Studies and Quayola’s Unfinished Sculptures –, or by generating new organisms as Grégory Chatonsky does with his installations.