Why art cannot be automated

In a world demarcated by process and efficiency, the first intuition towards solving any problem is to maximize scale such that the search rate is proportional to the magnitude of the problem space at hand. While effective at yielding solutions within industrial and economic applications, when this premise is applied towards the automation of art, it becomes a category error of fundamental proportions.

If any of the great images, statues, or monuments such as the Mona Lisa, David, The School of Athens, or The Pantheon could be perfectly replicated at the atomic level on-demand and plastered indiscriminately upon every public space ad infinitum, those spaces by default wouldn’t just immediately become aesthetically ordained because the final rendition of said object represented solely in its physical form is insufficient in describing the function of art alongside the role of the artist(s) in rendering the created object.

Art is revered for the same reasons we value history; it’s the product of something immutable that can never be replicated nor simulated. Otherwise, if history were not to be the product of an intractable reality, but rather of a simulation such that history could be generated anew posthumously, there would be no reason to commemorate the recollection of said human events. Following along this vein, the artist exists in continuity of a people with a particular mythology from a time and place that’ll never come to exist again and is commemorated for what they were able to intuit and bring to the fore out of that specific context but also towards their contributions to the human story at large.

The very premise of automating art begins with the false assumption that the limiting input for rendering a more beautiful world is contingent upon the physical means of producing aesthetically ordained objects rather than the spiritual yearning to fulfill a higher calling. This would be like saying societal morality is only one set of regulations away from being achieved, irrespective of what is truly felt in the hearts and minds of the people in their unadulterated form outside the constraints of the law. An authentically moral society would be comprised of people seeking sainthood but on average arriving at the “good” as reconciliation for striving towards the apotheosis of all virtue. The mechanistic automation of art attempts to mimic the output of what a society genuinely devoted to beauty would look like, but without ever committing to the sacrifice. By reducing this yearning to beauty into a measurable quantity, the ineffable transmutes into the predictable by denominating value via the numerical aggregate rather than by the vitality of what animates a people in said society.

If St. Peter’s Basilica could be perfectly replicated at the atomic level and instantaneously placed anywhere on earth, the replica could only ever be spiritually castrated relative to the original because of the decoupled continuity of how the initial object came into rendition via its historical genealogy. In this context, that causal chain began with Jesus Christ appointing the Apostle Peter in Galilee, to the founding of the Church of Rome, and to that very basilica becoming the spiritual center of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church. Believing that it is solely the presence of aesthetically ordained objects that renders a beautiful society would be like surrounding yourself in ornate churches but devoid of the animating spirit of divine liturgy, thus in effect rendering the building into a ghoul by taking on the image of a perfect body but devoid of any soul.

In some respects, beauty and technology are diametrically opposed; for the engineer strips down any representation down to its barest form irrespective of what artifacts are lost in the compression, whilst the artist knows not of compromise and elongates every representation down to the most imperceptible of ornamentations. The artist is interested only in generating a single immaculate transfiguration even if requiring thousands of indistinguishable iterations in succession, while the engineer renders the inverse, focusing on how efficiently the task on hand can be completed and replicated at scale relative to the input units of said system. In effect, when the engineer thinks of scale, the artist intuits perfection, whilst when the artist ornaments the immaculate, the engineer abstracts into the essential.

If a 3D printer existed that could output objects in the style of the most revered paintings, statues, frescoes, and monuments of the human corpus and teleported those objects at random into city centers around the world and genuinely began rendering beauty into the world both at a spiritual and physical level, what would this say of what art actually is?

This would then mean the replica of St Peter’s Basilica would be identical in all permutations to the original because there is no spiritual transmission from the creator(s) to the rendered object nor any of the historical provenance. The only thing we would be revering is the external shape and outline of the object, thus in effect idolizing a spiritually orphaned ghoul. Functionally, this would liken the artist from a creator into a prospector, one whom serendipitously discovers shapes, curves, colors, and outlines in accordance with what outputs a positive dopamine response contingent upon the evolutionary pressures that shaped the brain, nervous system, and body alike.

The example of the 3D printer above proposes a theoretical attempt towards automating art using the corpus of prior great art as its stylistic foundation; however, in that context it’s abundantly clear that only derivative art is being created rather than never-before-begotten forms. How would one then go about and attempt automating the creation of novel art whilst foregoing the premise that there is a spiritual component in both the creation and consummation of art?

Automating art would require at least one of the following to be true; the forces of space time constituting human history and by necessity the creation of art is following some Hegelian trajectory such that future art could be predicted following this path trace, reality itself as we know it is computationally tractable and therefore bounded thus making future phenomena predictable within a simulation, or that the inputs entering the human body that elicit a positive dopamine response is also bounded, therefore objects within said boundary conditions that fulfill the likeness of art could be selected at random and rendered into the physical form.

However, the proposed conditions above for automating art abstracts out the personhood of the artist as being resultant of a larger process or into an intermediary that coincidentally delivers a positive dopamine response rather than of a person pouring the fiber of their being into the outputted rendition, thus insinuating there is a more fundamental component to constituting what exactly is art.

For art of any kind to be commenced, a blank canvas is required. From afar, this might seem trivial, but when interrogated up close, the point of demarcation is not abundantly clear. The first representation that might come to mind is a white piece of paper, a flat canvas of uniform composition and color, something not naturally occurring in nature. However, when you inspect two sheets of paper up close at the molecular level, you’ll discover no two sheets of paper are atomically or geometrically identical.

What we actually define as a “blank” canvas for art to permute upon is not at all contingent on the material composition of the canvas. Some of the earliest works of art found in the Chauvet Cave in France or on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi used the curved backdrop of the cave as the “canvas”. The same goes for music; the “canvas” from which music is generated is air, which usually is attributed to the average motion of air molecules that we determine as “silence” irrespective of the shape of the room; however, even in a sports arena littered with a cacophony of sounds, song and chant can still arise amidst the chaos. Even a field of grass, when viewed at the correct vantage point from above, can become a “canvas”, with one of the most notable examples of crop field art being the Nazca Lines of Peru.

In effect, the “canvas” is the world while the paintbrush is the will. For there to be any canvas at all, there needs to be a coupled theory of mind to separate what is of the world and what is of the will; otherwise, it becomes impossible for there to be art. Therefore, triggering the question of what is the “self” and all the other derivative inquiries of whether selfhood can be solely determined via material composition (DNA) or if selfhood mandates the necessity of an immutable supra-material reference point, described best via the notion of the soul.

The empty canvas is intuitively attributed as the precursor upon which art can be permuted because it represents a literal slice of reality upon which man’s will can impose itself unabated. The canvas is of the same archetypal significance as the stone tablet and the table, the former being the slate where law is etched upon and the latter being a literal plane floating above the surface of the earth. Whether that was the stone tablet of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God or The Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples, the straight lines of the flat plane represent the creating of order out of chaos, therefore being an imperative precursor for which law, order, civilization, and art to commence upon.

What does the artist actually do then?

The artist operates at a superposition between intuition and overcoming, such that the creative act is precipitated upon that same premonition and resolved as the chasm between that intuition superimposed onto reality and reality superimposed back onto that intuition gets reconciled. The artist captures a piece of the universal by pouring their life force into the creation, and if the emanation is truly virile, it compels those in its presence to begin their own becoming(s) by directing their spirit towards the eternal, thus in effect bearing fruit upon itself.

The final rendition of what the artist outputs is not just a particular amalgamation of sensory perceptions, but rather there is a spiritual inertia as it propagates upon the person receiving the emanation. This necessitates that the output of the artist must be of will and spirit, the same spirit comprising all persons whom are made in the image and likeness of God, such that God is the unmoved mover to all being and each person mirrors this same likeness, being the unmoved mover to all forward propagations within their own life. Therefore, that which is of will cannot be of chance, and that which is not of chance does not await discovery, for if the spirit is of divine composition, the artist must be generating new forms never before begotten rather than discovering the already begotten.

Returning back to the question of automating art, here lies a fundamental question: if some system existed that could automate art, what would constitute the blank slate of “nothingness” for the rendition to be generated upon? It was demonstrated via the example of the sheet of paper that material composition alone is insufficient in making that determination. Ultimately, “nothingness” is a representation of some symbol state; however, the next question becomes who and what determines which symbols map to what physical state, and could it be possible that this mapping can be arrived at autonomically without a creator making said determinations? What this insinuates is that art as a category could not exist nor be meaningful in any substantive manner if there is not a person whom is fully responsible for outputting said renditions capable of being their own unmoved mover.

In the example of the original St. Peter’s Basilica, it’s evident there’s a spiritual inertia contingent upon its historical continuity that separates the original object from the replica; one might then ask how you would assign this provenance of spiritual inertia to a representational abstraction like digital art, film, or text? The fundamental problem is that the representation in this abstracted form can be replicated indiscriminately, thus making it fundamentally impossible to differentiate the duplicate from the original because there’s no continuity to a physical time and place to make the distinction. When an object is in this “representational” state, it exists solely as information, which is precisely why it can be replicated indefinitely, thus lacking any physical continuity.

It’s for this exact reason that art cannot just be a private affair, but rather must enter into the collective subconscious by undergoing a public ritual of which the creator(s) pronounces what was created onto the world such that the rendition transfigures from the representational to the particular, thus beginning its own mortality by being measured upon its own virility to compel those in its presence to begin their own becomings and render fruit onto the world like the original artist did. It is precisely at the singular moment when said observer is compelled into action of rendering beauty into the world as was begotten onto them that the rendition begins getting etched into the collective subconscious.

Without this public declaration, the representation never bears a becoming into being, thus existing as something closer to a thought than a rendition, analogous to the illusory apparitions felt present in the lucidity of a dream state, akin to being bare information decoupled from reality. This is why we don’t hold attributes like the golden ratio, rule of thirds, or any shared commonality derived from the great works in the same regard as the rendition itself, because it’s solely representational rather than of a rendition that has undergone a becoming into the flesh and blood.

When a film is launched, the event is not solely demarcated by the distribution of the physical copies into each movie theater, but rather by the spiritual transmission that commences from the persons who consecrated the film to the rest of the public at large. The same goes with book authors; the launching of a book usually involves a book signing for the first edition copies as a means to etch the presence of the author into a physical time and place.

Therefore, in context to the artist, the outputted rendition is paramount to their function, but equally as important is the community surrounding the artist whom took to heart said person’s ideas and worldview, thus making it functionally impossible to separate the artist as a person from their works. The artist is not just a biological machine outputting renditions of the aesthetic variety, but a flesh-and-blood person whom passes down their wisdom not only in their works but also through their spoken word and physical presence.

Consider the foundational texts comprising the Bible that we’ve come to worship up until this day, as those same canonical texts had not been consecrated until hundreds of years after the last book of the New Testament had been written, yet the continuity remained unbroken, thus demonstrating the rendered text was a by-product of a larger living and breathing tradition. Once more, the physical texts of the Bible do not solely constitute the Christian tradition, thus accentuating the point that the rendition of the artist in isolation is ineffective in capturing the totality of their personhood and what their art truly represents.

The premise of automating art can only be made possible by decoupling the works, personhood, and community of the artist as functionally non-overlapping entities, each subject to independently operating processes. However, if art could be automated such that aesthetically inclined objects could be stochastically outputted at scale, what good would it be to have aesthetic renditions of illusory mythologies that have never come to be? What would there be to cherish of art, if art could be made the product of chance? If art truly is downstream of a stochastic process, then why should it be treated any differently than gambling, the flipping of a coin, or any other possible activity that may render novelty upon a person?

We value art precisely because it means something absolutely and thus is derived not of a probability distribution, but of will and spirit, therefore superseding all notions of chance. Art can only be meaningful because the reality undergirding it is intractable and the very moments of life that animated the artist towards their becoming were resultant of something ineffably real and undeniably felt that ignited them from that point onwards to devote their entire life towards.

It’s for this same reason why images produced via text-to-image generators cannot be considered art because of the randomness intrinsic in the process of how said image generator outputs the final output, because fundamentally, a rendition cannot be considered art if said output was either the product of chance or of a rote mechanical process, i.e, a direct replication.

To claim a rendition as your own, the first iteration must have begun from a blank slate, thus being a product of your own will and spirit; otherwise, you leave to chance something that must be of the absolute. In principle, one could begin with the first iteration as being machine-generated from a stochastic process, but regardless of how many successive alterations could be brought upon that first permutation, one could only ever claim at most partial ownership of said rendition rather than absolute provenance. This is not to say that one can’t find inspiration from other artists, but that the rendition must come organically from within and be representative as such.

A similar criticism can even be applied to renditions produced of a strict aesthetic tradition (i.e., religious iconography), where said outputs can begin to take on the properties of an assembly line product if the standards are applied too rigidly, thus making it nigh impossible to detect any semblance of a specific individual outputting said rendition. Otherwise, if an autonomic physical process can be instituted for creating said renditions in that specific traditional aesthetic, the person simply becomes an assembly line intermediary for that process rather than their work representing an overcoming from their own immediate personhood.

The truth is that there will never exist the means to cheat the pain and tumult necessary to creating something both beautiful and never before begotten, for doing so will expunge every last fiber of your being. By attempting to skirt this pain, the only thing that will be resultant of that is the creation of spiritually orphaned ghouls. The solution of “scale” that technology proposes is not the answer, as there are some things in this world that cannot be solved through process and automation but only via unforgiving, merciless grit.

Art is premised on the assumption that the ideal can bear fruit in the physical form as an immaculate transfiguration. When art is executed perfectly, one gets stricken in such awe that their very role in the physical universe gets reconsidered in that singular instance. When a monument of the magnitude such as the Altar of the Fatherland gets erected, there’s no optimization process to get it “right”; meaning, you can’t “scale” yourself a way to a solution via successive iterations; that correctness must be instituted from the moment of its conception.

Using a hammer, chisel, paintbrush, and vivid enough imagination, just about any rendition the mind could conjure could be rendered. The reason why we don’t find the world around us as beautiful is not because of the technical means to produce aesthetically ordained objects, but because collectively our hearts are simply uninterested in rendering beauty onto the world. Some of the most revered churches that define European cityscapes have taken hundreds of years to build, which in our current context is anathema to how we justify constructing buildings because we’re primarily motivated by the economic return and immediate utility that said building can provide. Not only does there need to be a yearning to render beauty onto the world, but also the collective will to endure the pain that can take generations of agonizing hand-chiseled labor to ornament every last square millimeter in pristine decorum; thus, it should be no surprise that the dominant feature of our city centers today has become the sports arena rather than the sheer beauty of the architecture itself.

The world can be made however we may will, and as such ornamented in the most immaculate of beauty, but if we are unable to endure the brunt necessary to render such outcome, the world will remain no different than how we find it now. The time to generate is now.

---

If you like my work feel free to give me a follow on Twitter/X