Contemporary artists often use digital technologies to conceptualize and execute their work,
which has not only influenced how artists think and produce creatively, but has also changed
viewing processes and aesthetic judgements among those engaging with a work of art. This
raises the question: Have computers become more than just an artistic tool? And more
importantly, can computers actually create on their own?
This is a question that researchers at Rutgers University, College of Charleston, and Facebook
investigated in a 2017 experiment in which they asked 18 volunteers to look at hundreds of
images in order to judge them on artistic quality. Some of these images were of paintings made
by humans; others were generated by artificial intelligence algorithms. Their surprising findings
call into question the concept of creativity as an exclusively human mode of thought and
function.
Visual artist Amy Ellingson engages with this question in her paintings and prints by exploring
how humans can collaborate with digital technologies to elicit the aesthetic dimensions of
computer-generated imagery, or the visual qualities that can conjure ineffable human emotions
and cognitive processes that one experiences when looking at an artwork they appreciate.
Describing herself as a “computer formalist,” she designs her compositions using a computer to
create art about formal repetitions and variations in computer-generated systems and
networks—in other words, imagery that is consistent with our contemporary visual culture, as it
is driven by digital means of transmission and communication.
For one of her series of prints, entitled Identical/Variation, which is in the Gund Gallery
Collection, Ellingson used the composition of one of her paintings as the organizing structure for
each, and shifted the orientation and color of subsequent layers to express “originality within
repetition.” She worked closely with master printers at Magnolia Editions printmaking studio to
realize her compositions through printmaking processes, involving, first, an etching in black ink,
printed from a plate created on a flatbed printer. The etching was then embellished with acrylic
color and finished with a layer of laser-etched relief woodcut, printed in a series of four different
colors in variable orientation. She processed the compositions through traditional art-making
means, and also adapted the vocabularies of abstract painting, to explore the relationship
between technology and aesthetics, with the goal of evoking a postmodern aesthetic, or what
some might call the technological sublime. In other words, her process points to the “creative”
potential of technology that extends beyond human capability and comprehension.
How could a software design project explore the creative potential of computers, to help us
understand how our “human” concept of creativity could be challenged by digital technologies?
A foundational step in the research for such a project would include an opportunity to
experience artwork in-person, and guidance in articulating what artistic creativity, originality, and
aesthetic appreciation means to us.