As Baudrillard puts it, we live in the simulacral world. In the quest to find the height of new aesthetic views and new aesthetic objects we are finally at the point of creation, the creation of a new world in a completely different plane. The material world or “reality”, as one would simply call it, has limited availability of material space and positions for aesthetic objects. Of course, not literally, humans are trying to find new philosophical planes of existence in science and the arts. At the juncture of such changes, there are constant questions that arise regarding aesthetic objects and their place in the scientific world. The discourse and debate on the relationship between art and technology have been recurring themes as the advancement of technology pursues new dimensions.  The question is which definition of technology has staked its relevance in these discourses. Technology not as in the digital or the analogue, but technology as, in Heidegger’s definition, “a human activity”¹ will make it easier for the reader to understand the use of the term in this article.

 Now, going further into the relation of technology and art, the fact is very well known that art uses technology as a means to manifest in the perceivable world of humans. Or rather what is deemed art, can only be made by human activity whether directly or indirectly. The qualifications of an aesthetic object are such that they are deemed an aesthetic object by its “relevance”. Hence, art is art if deemed so. While I may be accused of oversimplifying the matter, it is a fact that the material or process does not control the labelling of an object as aesthetic. The symptoms of an aesthetic object rather lie in its conceptual and contextual association, and if this concept and context does not agree with the audience it will not be described as art. This is not just the death of the author but rather the death of the authority of the author to be an author. The art is not deemed as an art object by the artist but rather by the system of its viewers; they on their own cannot make individual decisions. Even going back to the cognitive revolution, one can determine that it has always been the case, to believe in something common is what creates the system and the complexity of that belief existing comes after. The author being an author has never been a scientific fact but rather a belief. For example, a cup is a cup if believed to be. If I ash my cigarette on the cup it becomes an ashtray. The only fact is that the cup is a container that can hold other materials or objects. It has mass and volume, it is made of matter. If there is an agreement for a certain group that a cup should have a certain shape and made up of a certain material, then that prescribed form becomes a cup upon mere agreement. Similarly, art is an agreement, as is an aesthetic object an agreement on aesthetic views. So simply put ‘Art is an agreement produced by human activity.’ Now if the reader agrees as such we can move forward towards the concern of this article. 

I believe that the “simulacrum”, while it continues its infinite imitation, has passed through our plane of existence and it now finds itself in a different plane of existence. The visual cultural plane of India is at a point of crisis, the idea of the virtual or digital is a very threatening idea for a material conservationist. But more than that the economy cannot afford the evolution of physical material to virtual material just yet. The base foundation of Indian culture, while boasting a spiritual and philosophical beginning, still cannot transcend towards the virtual plane. The fear that stops this evolution is the fear of losing the ‘traditional’  in pursuing the new. India’s wide diversity of cultural material still remains without knowing the experience of scholarly touch. The proof is that if an AI is tasked to illustrate the cultural realm of any lesser-known community in India, it is a given that the image will not be anything but a stereotype if there is any. This would show a lack of information, or rather the lack of a collective knowledge on the particular subject, hence it strays from being inclusive at all. If there is no knowledge of something then it does not exist to the majority of the population. Hence, the struggle against evolution comes from the struggle for existence. But the existence of what? What truly existed or the simulation of what once existed? But this is a problem for epistemology. And knowledge is made by power. Now, another problem that comes with the digital world is the legitimacy of the aesthetic object. The reason it cannot be accepted by a certain amount of the populace brings us back to the question of “human activity”. The question of whether there is any human effort used in the process of creation. 

With this, let us call in an argument. In the world of Minecraft, Markus “Notch” Persson, has essentially turned a computer-aided design (CAD) program into a computer game, making millions of users quasi-artists/designers. Now it is not just an open world where the users can operate and explore freely but also create with almost no restrictions. In this “world” if one were to create a sculpture, architectural structure or a painting, would it be agreeable to call this accumulation of 1s and 0s  as art? Of course, we have digital artists, NFTs being auctioned at Christie’s, digital currency, virtual real estate and so on. We have, whether a certain amount of the population agrees or not, accepted virtual reality as part of the existing reality. But the curious thing is why we still find it harder to believe in something based on ideas that we have been using for a thousand years. For example, paper currency exists on the notion that everybody believes in the value it is associated with. The paper with specific prints and embellishments, with the value of 100 rupees printed on it, is only just paper. In the case of demonetization, the note of that specific design would no longer hold any value because the system no longer believes in the agreement. So the value only comes from a mutual agreement on a concept or definition. Similarly, digital art was not previously associated with the notion of high art, or even art to some, due to the existing definition of art that was agreed upon back at the moment. Some of the arguments may have been that it did not cater to the human element found in traditional works. It was created through a computer, even though there was physical labour, there wasn’t actual material human touch that was connected to the virtual matter. Also, the fact that the digital images could be copied in the exact same data did not agree with people’s idea of ‘uniqueness’ that was associated with an artwork. So in the case of AI, a similar disposition happens again. The artwork is executed by imposing a bunch of commands targeted to produce certain kinds of visuals and while there is no physical craftsmanship, the commands are what shape the final work. Of course, the additional problem that this new technology has is the idea of plagiarism, or open-sourcing the artworks of artists who probably have not given a go on the very idea. But with growth, unless given a command to provide visual information similar to an already existing visual, the AI can probably remove any trace of imitation with the millions of data that it has acquired. This itself can be used to create new riveting visuals that go beyond human mental mechanics. It merely becomes a semblance in an instant.

Interestingly enough, this is what humans have done over the course of history. It has only been constant imitation till the very soul (context & concept) of an aesthetic object changes leaving only a semblance with entirely new value. So, by definition AI art, despite finding its sources from pre-existing  artworks would become a new artwork in itself. Artists like David Szauder, work with AI to produce new uncanny visuals that produce a synthetic element and hence add to the eerie quality that is usually not present in “traditional” or “digital” works made without any AI assistance. These bizarre images are a result of the AI’s incomprehension of how the imported data could fit together, like the changing number of fingers or blurry assimilation with the background and so on.  In the context of India, there are artists like Harshit Agrawal who have used GANs or  Generative Adversarial Networks (a type of common artificial neural network) to produce a different alternative to using AI as tools in creating what is agreed as art. But here I believe the reason that these works are accepted as art is because, other than the permutation and combination of known data, the crucial element is the “soul” of the artwork. The concept and context allow for it to channel this idea of humanity that the human belief system accepts. 

Since, humanity measures all things in the image of itself,  to say man makes everything in the scope of his experience, it is hard to accept new aesthetic concerns unless the system allows it. Due to India’s diverse economic status, it becomes hard to accept such novel conceptual spaces created due to the lack of resources to understand them. How do we handle this change without feeling existential danger? Of course, this article does not have an answer. If it did it would be a research paper on the front page of some famous yet ambiguous research journal rather than a renowned art magazine. But what it is, is the introduction to a new dimension of vast areas that can be explored further through aesthetic understanding. It is the prologue to the fifth dimension of aesthetics and it hopes to create more discourses on the very grounds of virtual and digital existentialism in art.

1. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and other essays. 1977 ↩︎

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Facsimiles-Garl, 1977.

MAP Academy Encyclopedia of Art. “AI Art in India”. Accessed September 12, 2024. https://mapacademy.io/article/ai-art-in-india/