Week 3 - Art + Robotics

Since modern industrialization revolutionized almost every corner of human society and culture, traditional art creation and critics have faced various of challenges. According to Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher and cultural critic, art works lost unique so-called “aura” of existence under the fact that plural, precise copies of artworks could be made by modern reproduction technology. (1) It implied that instead of watched, analyzed and criticized by only a few professionals, modern artworks were increasingly under inspection of the mass majority. This transformation happened so fast that many traditional artists harshly criticized the involvement of the mass majority. (Benjamin 3 - 5) Duhamel, for example, believed movie, a form of art primarily aiming for mass audience, “kindle[d] no light in the heart and awaken[ed] no hope …” Benjamin pointed out that art should be and had been appreciated by the mass majority with an example of architecture. Architecture had the duality of having value of both utility and aesthetics. However, Benjamin agreed with conservative artists and critics when he said the public was an “absent-minded” examiner. (Benjamin 7)

 

Figure 1: People in an auction of Scream

Source: http://antiquesandartireland.com

/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/The-Scream-being-sold.jpg

Douglas Davis, a vanguard of contemporary Internet art who just passed away two years ago, analyzed the concern of Benjamin and his contemporary artists and critics from an era in which not only the reproduction of work was more precise and convenient, but the transmission of that also reached the ceiling of the speed of light. With Internet, people’s work could reach every corner of the world in literally no time. Therefore, more of the mass majority could be involved, yet Davis suggested that last generation of critics overlooked the harm of the ability of reproduction. (382 - 383) In digital era, people were still maniac at pursuing the authentic version of artwork, investing millions of dollars in the genuine (see figure 1). The “aura” of the original work was not undermined but even enhanced when digital technology allowed incremental development, distribution and revision of work. Davis used his own work, The Last Nine Minutes, as an example of how this was possible. (383) At last, he emphasized the aura did not reside “in the thing itself but in the originality of the moment when we see, hear, read, repeat, revise.” (386)

Video 2: Massimo Banzi's TED talk on Arduino

Source: https://www.youtube.com
/watch?time_continue=8&v=UoBUXOOdLXY

I can even imagine, how harshly Massimo Banzi, one of the founders of Arduino, would criticize the 1900s critics for they believed the public were absent-minded. Arduino is a programmable micro controller that can serve as a “smart center” in many inventions. In his TED talk, Banzi showed the audience what Arduino had enabled men, women, and even kids to make their ideas come true. More importantly, it showed how smart, creative and imaginative the so-called absent-mined could be. Arduino was certainly a resultant of the industrial and digital revolution. The reproduction of Arduino did not evolve into replicates, but all those wonderful, miraculous and exciting little inventions brought out by the community.

Figure 3: World champion Lee Sedol couldn't believe his defeat against AI

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content

/uploads/2016/03/House-Alpha-Go-2-1200.jpg

The essence of the industrial revolution was the automation of production so that humans were able to make things much more efficient than handcrafting. In the twenty-first century, human beings are doing one similar thing – automation of thoughts – also known as artificial intelligence. Just like how conservatives reacted to mass production in the 1900s, many famous figures and critics today point out that artificial intelligence can smear the virtue of human intelligence and even threat human’s existence, including even Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, both of who are standing on the frontier of human technology. This truly reminds me of the concern of dehumanization of workers in the period of industrial revolution. However, I believe both mass production and artificial intelligence cannot replace human for the same reason: mass production needs people to design and artificial intelligence needs people not only to design but also to train. If one looked at how DeepMind trained AlphaGo, a Go AI software “who” recently defeated Lee Sedol, one of the best Go professional players in the world, s/he should be convinced that the victory was not possible without the smart strategy DeepMind picked to train the algorithms in the software. 

Bibliography

W. Benjamin. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." 1936. Print.
R. Cellan-Jones. "Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind." 2014. Web. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540
D. Davis. "The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction." 1995. Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 5. Third Annual New York Digital Salon. pp. 381-386. Print.
P. Holley. "Bill Gates on dangers of artificial intelligence: ‘I don’t understand why some people are not concerned’." 2015. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/28/bill-gates-on-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-dont-understand-why-some-people-are-not-concerned/
D. Silver et al. "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search." 2016. Print.