I ask: how can we differentiate art in the modern sense and digital art in the postmodern sense? There would be different approaches to this question. One of them would be to reflect on the creative production of the artistic object. In the creative act of modernity, in painting, sculpture, music, for example, the artist responds to his inspiration with an act whose intention is materialized in a material product (painting, sculpture, score) that allows the public to enjoy what said object is and evokes. In this sense, the artistic object of modernity can be perceived as a finished product and open to other interpretations. we behold the Gioconda and “us” smiles. But is it necessarily enigmatic?
In postmodern digital art, on the other hand, the artist’s technological interaction with the AI system implies that the object is produced (or self-reproduced) at the very moment of creation. In digital art there are surprises and there is chance. The AI system makes unexpected proposals to the artist. The object that the technology generates, with which the creator interacts, would seem to have a life of its own. Considered a unique contemporary experience, digital art displaces the place of the artist to enhance that of the object. This issue can be illustrated with the work of Coco Dávez. This artist uses an AI system called Midjourney that allows her to “convert everything you ask her to into images” (text to image). One can imagine a street in Paris in 1819 and ask the system, pressing the “Imagine” command, to recreate it. Using Midjourney, Coco Dávez develops visual projects in places that she has not necessarily visited or known, places that were not in her imagination and that Midjourney facilitates. In other words: Midjourney offers a circuit to the walker Coco Dávez, who travels through the AI in a playful way. She designs by playing —that is to say, “imagining” in the sense of pressing the key of said function— totem poles in the middle of the desert or an installation of crystals and reflective colors in the Joshua Tree National Park. Coco Dávez points out that Midjourney’s artificial intelligence allows her to create an image whose description is never the same. She defines it this way: “In AI no two results are the same, even if the description is the same. And this chance is responsible for often adding that touch of salt to that idea we had in mind. And most of the time it raises it, which makes me think that it would be interesting to change the word ‘failure’ to ‘chance’, since, in a matter of unexpected events, it can surprise us.”
The philosophical work of Walter Benjamin, a modern wanderer wandering in transit towards postmodernity, provides some clues to analyze what happens with all this, in an operation of update quite juicy philosophical. There are two key concepts of Benjamin’s that can be very useful here: one is the idea of the “dream lock” and the other is the notion of “double floor”.
Contemporary digital art has something of a dream lock because it establishes a new frontier in thinking. The adjective dream comes from the Greek word oneiros (dream, as content). Coco Dávez talks about the way of creating it as a game to “magnify the dream” and says that playing consists of “any idea making sense and the judgment begins to wane until it vanishes”.
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Benjamin says this: “Thoughts often act less because of what they say than because of the moment they come to us. Thus, one who appears in the crowd of others (…) does not influence us as profoundly as the one who assails us in solitude, when we are not in the mood to think, and has taken the most secret path, that of the dark room, that of the heart and kidneys, that of the diaphragm and the liver, of which the ancients knew well.
The dream lock opens and closes that encrypted dark room, which tells of us without actually being there. Some of this experience, like a daytime fantasy turned into images, we find in the digital art developed by Midjourney. This application opens and closes the dream lock proposing a random journey. It gives the art object a dimension similar to that of the dreaming subject. He (the object) does not know that he is dreaming, he has been separated from the artist who dreamed him. In turn, the artist—dreamer par excellence—falls into the hole of the imaginary where, following Coco Dávez, judgment dwindles until it vanishes, giving way to the installation of a digital object that does not exist in reality but is digitally alive.
In Midjourney, the artist plays like a child. He doesn’t know where he’s going, although he notices the important details of that never-before-seen image. In a way, chance, on the side of the AI system, can surprise the artist, declaring war on his “author” vanity. Midjourney has a command (the voice of an imperative): “Imagine.” It is not the same as the symbolic game, where a reality that does not exist is replaced by something else that represents it. The application creates an imagined reality where you can circulate as if you were on a double floor.
In Paris tickets (1927-1929), Benjamin describes this double floor as the projection of the walker beyond the circuit he draws: “Moved as if by a clockwork mechanism, the figure of the flâneur It advances along the cobbled street with its double floor”.
Imagining how the walker is transformed in the circuits that “carry him”, Benjamin says that “the ground on which the walker walks, the asphalt, is hollow”. Eye! There is no need to be confused here. Benjamin’s walker doesn’t press the Midjourney key: “Imagine”. The philosophical circuit does not respond to an imperative command: it is a fantasy through which thought circulates in the form of digression. The distracted walker does not design an imaginary as in Midjourney’s proposal. For all philosophy, the idea is untranslatable into an image. Philosophy thrives on the symbolic register, which questions things as unimaginary as justice, goodness or beauty, ideas that Midjourney could surely turn into images of unexpected precision.
Benjamin used the expression “aura” to describe the way in which an object reverberates a polysemous meaning. So perhaps, wandering around Midjourney, Benjamin would look up which side the aura of the object beyond command is on. And perhaps in postmodernity the creation of the new will cease to be an exclusive indication of the human.
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