Art has always existed in a complex, symbiotic and continually evolving relationship with the technological capabilities of a culture. Those capabilities constrain the art that is produced, and inform the way art is perceived and understood by its audience.

Like the invention of applied pigments, the printing press, photography, and computers, we believe machine intelligence is an innovation that will profoundly affect art. As with these earlier innovations, it will ultimately transform society in ways that are hard to imagine from today’s vantage point; in the nearer term, it will expand our understanding of both external reality and our perceptual and cognitive processes.

As with earlier technologies, some artists will embrace machine intelligence as a new medium or a partner, while others will continue using today’s media and modes of production. In the future, even the act of rejecting it may be a conscious statement, just as photorealistic painting is a statement today. Any artistic gesture toward machine intelligence — whether negative, positive, both, or neither — seems likelier to withstand the test of time if it’s historically grounded and technically well informed.

Walter Benjamin illustrated this point mordantly in his 1931 essay, Little History of Photography, citing an 1839 critique of the newly announced French daguerreotype technology in the Leipziger Stadtanzeiger (a “chauvinist rag”):

“To try to capture fleeting mirror images,” it said, “is not just an impossible undertaking, as has been established after thorough German investigation; the very wish to do such a thing is blasphemous. Man is made in the image of God, and God’s image cannot be captured by any machine of human devising. The utmost the artist may venture, borne on the wings of divine inspiration, is to reproduce man’s God-given features without the help of any machine, in the moment of highest dedication, at the higher bidding of his genius.”

This sense of affront over the impingement of technology on what had been considered a defining human faculty has obvious parallels with much of today’s commentary on machine intelligence. It’s a reminder that what Rosi Braidotti has called “moral panic about the disruption of centuries-old beliefs about human ‘nature’” is nothing new. [1]

Here we have the philistine notion of “art” in all its overweening obtuseness, a stranger to all technical considerations, which feels that its end is nigh with the alarming appearance of the new technology. Nevertheless, it was this fetishistic and fundamentally antitechnological concept of art with which the theoreticians of photography sought to grapple for almost a hundred years, naturally without the smallest success.

While these “theoreticians” remained stuck in their thinking, practitioners were not standing still. Many professionals who had been making their living painting miniature portraits enacted a very successful shift to studio photography; and with those who brought together technical mastery and a good eye, art photography was born, over the following decades unfolding a range of artistic possibilities latent in the new technology that had been inaccessible to painters: micro-, macro- and telephotography, frozen moments of gesture and microexpression, slow motion, time lapse, negatives and other manipulations of the film, and on and on.

Artists who stuck to their paintbrushes also began to realize new possibilities in their work, arguably in direct response to photography18. David Hockney interprets cubism from this perspective:

… cubism was about the real world. It was an attempt to reclaim a territory for figuration, for depiction. Faced with the claim that photography had made figurative painting obsolete, the cubists performed an exquisite critique of photography; they showed that there were certain aspects of looking — basically the human reality of perception — that photography couldn’t convey, and that you still needed the painter’s hand and eye to convey them21. [2]

Of course, the ongoing relationship between painting and photography is by no means mutually exclusive; the language of wholesale embrace on the one hand versus response or critique on the other is inadequate. Hockney’s “joiners” explored rich artistic possibilities in the combination of photography with “a painter’s hand and eye” via collage in the 1980s, and his more recent video pieces from Woldgate Woods do something similar with montage.

Hockney was also responsible, in his 2001 collaboration with physicist Charles Falco, for reigniting interest in the role optical instruments — mirrors, lenses, and perhaps something like a camera lucida — played in the sudden emergence of visual realism in early Renaissance art. It has been clear for a long time that visual effects like the anamorphic skull across the bottom of Hans Holbein’s 1553 painting The Ambassadors could not have been rendered without clever optical tricks involving tracing from mirrors or lenses — effectively, paintbrush-assisted photography. [3] Had something like the Daguerre-Niépce photochemical process existed in their time, it seems likely that artists like van Eyck and Holbein would have experimented with it, either in addition to, in combination with, or even instead of paint.

So, the old European masters fetishized by the Leipziger Stadtanzeiger were not reproducing “man’s God-given features without the help of any machine”, but were in fact using the state of the art. They were playing with the same new optical technologies that allowed Galileo to discover the moons of Jupiter, and van Leeuwenhoek to make the first observations of microorganisms.

Understanding the ingenuity of the Renaissance artists as users and developers of technology should only increase our regard for them and our appreciation of their work. It should not come as a surprise, as in their own time they were not “Old Masters” canonized in the historical wings of national art museums, but intellectual and cultural innovators. To imagine that optics somehow constituted “cheating” in Renaissance painting is both a failure of the imagination and the application of a historically inappropriate value system. Yet even today, some commentators and theoreticians — typically not themselves working artists — remain wedded to what Benjamin called “the philistine notion of ‘art’”, as pointed out in an article in The Observer from 2000 in response to the Hockney-Falco thesis:

Is [the use of optics] so qualitatively different from using grids, plumb-lines and maulsticks? Yes — for those who regard these painters as a pantheon of mysterious demigods, more than men if less than angels, anything which smacks of technical aid is blasphemy. It is akin to giving scientific explanations for the miracles of saints. [4]

There is a pungent irony here. Scientific inquiry has, step by step, revealed to us a universe much more vast and complex than the mythologies of our ancestors, while the parallel development of technology has extended our creative potential to allow us to make works (whether we call them “art”, “design”, “technology”, “entertainment”, or something else) that would indeed appear miraculous to a previous generation. Where we encounter the word “blasphemy”, we may often read “progress”, and can expect miracles around the corner. [5]

One would like to believe that, after being discredited so many times and over so many centuries, the “antitechnological concept of art” would be relegated to a fundamentalist fringe. However, if history has anything to teach us in this regard, it’s that this particular debate is always ready to resurface. Perhaps this is because it impinges, consciously or not, on much larger issues of human identity, status and authority. We resist epistemological shock. Faced with a new technical development in art it’s easier for us to quietly move the goalposts after a suitable period of outrage, re-inscribing what it means for something to be called fine art, what counts as skill or creativity, what is natural and what is artifice, and what it means for us to be privileged as uniquely human, all while keeping our categorical value system — and our human apartness from the technology — fixed.

More radical thinking that questions the categories and the value systems themselves comes from writers like Donna Haraway and Joanna Zylinska. Haraway, originally a primatologist, has done a great deal to blur the conceptual border between humans and other animals [6]; the same line of thinking led her to question human exceptionalism with respect to machines and human-machine hybrids. This may seem like speculative philosophy best left to science fiction, but in many respects it already applies. Zylinska, in her 2002 edited collection The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, interviewed the Australian performance artist Stelarc, whose views on the relationship between humanity and technology set a useful frame of reference: