The animated film series A∨A – Artificial V Art

Under the title A∨A – Artificial V Art, the programme brings together films that rely on AI processes, take them up as a theme or were produced by them, and yet can stand on their own as a cinematic art form. Art and artificiality seem to be mutually dependent and thereby open a new approach to questions of authorship and the definition of art. The programme is both an invitation to discourse and to raise awareness about current technological developments and their creative potential. The cinematic qualities of beauty and technical innovation seem to be interconnected as they are both in the eye of the beholder.

Animated film has always been able to create new worlds without necessarily having to resort to materials, figures and other aspects of our real world. Animated film could therefore be described as “artificial” without relinquishing any of its artistic value. On the contrary, it is the use of new and unfamiliar techniques that gives animated film its special charm and its ability to reveal new worlds to the audience, to offer new perspectives and thus to always challenge familiar viewing habits.
It is through the artificial that animated film generates qualities that have always been inherent in art. As this programme proves, artificial intelligence is also one of the artistic means of animated film. The use of autonomous vehicles’ LiDAR sensors as cameras allows the audience to see the world from new, artificial perspectives (BAGGAGE MAN, 2015). As new narrators, artificial language models guide our gaze (GALAXY, 2020) to scenarios that increasingly arise from the unfamiliar and random (FEST, 2018). Conversely, the methodology of animated film is also able to extract the artistic from the artificial and to awaken creative potential in technical innovation.
But with the increased entry of AI into animated film, its artificial worlds also seem to be becoming ever more surreal, new to the human eye and even alien since they are no longer of purely human origin. Without that human level for comparison, the standards for what is experienced gradually elude us, and the question remains as to how much artistic potential there is in the artificial, or whether it can produce art at all. How do we rate AIVA’s art? Does the joy of the car in AUTO NOM feel authentic to us? These are questions about the nature of art itself.

Perhaps the answer requires not only solutions from art, but also from AI. The Turing test, for example, says that the quality of communication between recipients is more important when we can no longer compare human and artificial. So, do we perceive the reception of the films in this programme as the reception of works of art or of something else? And if it is art for us, would their different origins make any qualitative difference at all in their reception? Even Jackson Pollock might never have made a brushstroke if he had overthought it and not allowed for chance and the unknown. Art seems to be equally in the eye of the human and artificial beholder. The challenge and task of the film programme is to enter into this change of perspective by raising awareness of the creative potential of artificial processes and critically illuminating the legitimacy of artificial processes as artistic creators.

Yannick Tessenow