The exhibition of David Fathi “Feedback Loop” is the artist’s reflection on the theme of authorship in art. The question of authorship of an artwork arose with the invention of photography, was reconsidered by artists and philosophers many times later, and has become relevant again now, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in our lives.
After the death of God (Friedrich Nietzsche) and the death of the subject (Sigmund Freud), the author also appeared at the intellectual cemetery of humanity. “The Death of the Author” is a 1967 essay by the French structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes in which he expressed the idea that any text is self-sufficient and should not be perceived in connection with the author’s personality. Trying to equate the writer’s personality with his creation only distances the reader from subjective perception of the text. Although this essay addressed the authorship of literary works, it had an impact on all spheres of postmodern art.
European art first encountered the issue of authorship of a work after the invention of photography in 1827, when Nicéphore Niepce captured the image “View from the Window at Le Gras” by exposing a metal plate coated with bitumen in a camera obscura. Humanity obtained, for the first time, an image of the surrounding world without the direct involvement of human hands. Since then, photography has long fought for the right to document reality and was excluded from the realm of art for a long time. However, theorists and researchers of the nature of photography made people view photography as an independent art form, stating that a camera, for an artist, is just a tool like many others, and the artist’s will and idea can turn a photo into a work of art.
The question of the authorship of works of art became the most acute in 1917 due to Marcel Duchamp, an artist who initiated conceptual art. He elevated the will and idea of the artist to the absolute, completely severing the link between the creative process and the acknowledgment of authorship. Duchamp chose industrially manufactured objects, the so-called readymades, such as a urinal, a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, and others, and exhibited them in art gallery spaces. Thus, an industrially manufactured object, stripped of its utilitarian functions, received artistic status solely through the artist’s choice. Recognizing the beauty of pure form, as if appointing the meeting with the object, the viewer became a co-author. In this case, the artistic value shifted from the object to the idea.
David Fathi explores the issue of authorship of works created by artificial intelligence. The artist verbalizes a task to the algorithm of artificial intelligence, and the algorithm, using publicly available images, creates new images. In the exhibition “Feedback Loop,” AI visually reworks the concept of authorship itself, creating images based on Niepce’s photograph “View from the Window at Le Gras” and Duchamp’s readymade images. This dialogue of times is an intellectual game, the rules of which are yet to be established. Some argue that the artwork is the algorithm of AI itself, and the works created by it are not artistic pieces because they lack the manifestation of the artist’s will. However, even here, the artist makes their choice: a specific algorithm, task, specific images from a set provided.
So, who is the author? Until now, we believed that the author is someone who creates at least ideas and meanings. AI has not yet created fundamentally new meanings. New meanings are created by people, generated from personal existential experiences. Artificial intelligence processes existing ideas and images of human culture. Moreover, artificial intelligence endlessly trains on images it has created itself, forming a feedback loop*. David Fathi imagines these images wandering in machines like ghosts, lost, without thoughts, without ideas: “Generative images become a haunted museum, a spectral gallery. A cold machine curated by our own existing preconceived notions of art. Ghosts of past images linger in the datasets, influencing and pulling the [Gaussian] noise towards a bygone visual world. Echoes of the frozen museum continue to influence future images. The white cube, white museum. Western dominant spectrums. Preset textures. Gradually loading and repeating their motifs in a sacred virtual white gallery space.”
As Boris Groys, a contemporary philosopher and art theorist, noted, both Nietzsche and Duchamp proclaimed a reassessment of values as a principle that renews culture: “In this sense, both Nietzsche’s philosophical discourse and Duchamp’s artistic practice are examples of a breakthrough to a new understanding of innovation, both modernist and contemporary.” The emergence of AI inevitably leads to another reassessmentof values that also touches upon the issue of authorship in art.
Who will die and rise again this time?
*Feedback loop is a process in which the result of an action influences the action itself, creating a cyclical loop of influence. For example, in the context of systems or processes, this means that the output signal affects the input signal, which in turn affects the output signal, forming a cycle. This concept is widely used in science, engineering, management, and other fields.
Marina Russakova, May 2024
