Artist Agnieszka Pilat writing for Artnet:
Whenever a new medium is created, its context is an old medium. Shortly after the “electric wire panic,” the first feature films made at the beginning of the 20th-century used cameras and storylines to expand on the play; camera angles, non-chronological storytelling, and wide lenses came much later. With the advent of television, presenters initially stood in front of cameras and read the news as if it were a radio format.
Rather than assuming an outcome is preordained, artists should reclaim their agency and use A.I. in their work, becoming stakeholders in how the technology develops and directing its use in new mediums.
The introduction of new creative mediums typically follows the same pattern:
- Inventors, scientists, and engineers make a discovery
- Some subset of artists start experimenting with the new discovery
- Some subset of the public starts to panic and debate the definition of art
- Artists continue exploring the possible. First, by mimicking previous mediums and eventually carving out a new niche for the medium.
- The new medium gradually gains widespread acceptance in its new niche
New creative mediums don’t take off until they find their own niche. This can be a long, exciting process — one that we are living through now with AI generated art.
- The invention of photography didn’t simply make painting obsolete but instead forced artists to find the unique strengths of both mediums
- Just as movies aren’t simply recorded plays, an MP3 can be more than just a recorded live musical performance. You can layer tracks, speed them up, slow them down, chop and screw them, etc.
- A digital newspaper shouldn’t just be a static homepage when it can instead be a live, multimedia newsfeed
What will a true AI art medium look like? What will it let us create that we haven’t been able to create before?