Hidden Stories of AI, episode 3: the artists who painted with machines
Harold Cohen's AARON, the AI portrait that sold for $432,500 at Christie's, and Refik Anadol's machine dreams at MoMA.
What the video says
Can a machine make art? Artists have been testing that question for more than fifty years. Starting in the early 1970s, the British painter Harold Cohen built AARON, a program that made its own drawings. He kept teaching it for decades, until it could draw figures and plants, and add colour.
In 2018, a Paris collective called Obvious sold an AI-made portrait at Christie's in New York. Expected to fetch up to 10,000 dollars, it sold for 432,500. The AI had learned from 15,000 old portraits, and much of the code came from a 19-year-old artist, Robbie Barrat. Who, then, was the artist?
In 2022, the Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol showed Unsupervised at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. An AI trained on the museum's own collection dreamed new images on a giant wall, changing with the light, movement and weather around it. A painter's program, a sold portrait, a dreaming museum. The question is still open.
Next: the mysteries.
Sources
- Aesthetica: Dreaming in Digital
- Smithsonian Magazine
- CBC News
- Artnet: Refik Anadol, Unsupervised
- My Art Guides: Unsupervised
Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; no book covers, artworks, photos or film images reproduced. Music: “Journey To The Interweb” by Aemyn (CC0, Freesound); sounds: Freesound (CC0). Report a mistake