art and the boxmaker

Here is my latest work of Critical AI Art: Art and the Boxmaker (https://varnelis.net/art-and-the-boxmaker/).

I won’t include the whole piece here. There are two reasons for that. First, I still feel like it’s something of a draft. I am likely to revise it—even a little bit—and once a substack newsletter goes out, I can’t change it (in fact, I just did revise the ending! so it’s going to happen). Second, there are lots of works in slideshows and these can’t be added to Substack. So go to my site and take a look. Here are some excerpts …

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Over the winter holiday, I noticed William Gibson‘s Mastodon account went quiet after a few posts. No explanation, but like many people who seemed ready to leave Twitter after Elon Musk purchased it, he reverted to his old account where I found this exchange.

Twitter has devolved entirely into virtue-signaling, regardless of one’s political position, so initially, I thought that Gibson was simply agreeing, but this also seemed odd (“weird as hell?”) coming from him, whose Neuromancer trilogy expressly addressed the creation of art by Artificial Intelligence. Take Count Zero, in which an Artificial Intelligence dubbed the Boxmaker, assembles works in the style of Joseph Cornell so convincing that they are taken as real before being revealed as forgeries. Just possibly, they might look something like this.

Of course, in its present form, an AI Art generator is a tool, not so much an Artificial Intelligence, but rather a desiring machine—an algorithm that combines images in ways that resolve what it predicts will satisfy us. AI Art generators have no inherent intelligence or understanding of how these things go together, they are nothing more than programs that desire connection in ways that have been conditioned over time, "cognition" at the level of an insect seeking a red flower or perhaps a virus "seeking" a host. This is obviously, very different from Joseph Cornell, an artist of deep talent, capable of creating works that fostered emotional connection.

But what about the Boxmaker in Count Zero? On the one hand, the Boxmaker is capable of making works that are supposed to be enthralling. Take this encounter from the novel between disgraced art dealer Marly Krushkova (disgraced because she tried to sell a work by the Boxmaker as one of Cornell's) for who the boxes in Count Zero seem to be evidence not of a trained machine but of a consciousness on a human level, demonstrating the creation of aura, emotional connection, and nostalgia from simple objects— something far ahead of any mere Turing test. Take her encounter with a hologram of one of the Boxmaker's works:

… she took the package to the window and turned it over in her hands. It was wrapped in a single sheet of handmade paper, dark gray, folded and tucked in that mysterious Japanese way that required neither glue nor string, but she knew that once she’d opened it, she’d never get it folded again. The name and address of the Galerie were embossed in one comer, and her name and the name of her hotel were handwritten across the center in perfect italic script. She unfolded the paper and found herself holding a new Braun holoprojector and a flat envelope of clear plastic. The envelope contained seven numbered tabs of holofiche. Beyond the miniature iron balcony, the sun was going down, painting the Old Town gold. She heard car horns and the cries of children. She closed the window and crossed to a writing desk. The Braun was a smooth black rectangle powered by solar cells. She checked the charge, then took the first holo fiche from the envelope and slotted it.

The box she’d seen in Virek’s simulation of the Güell Park blossomed above the Braun, glowing with the crystal resolution of the finest museum-grade holograms. Bone and circuit-gold, dead lace, and a dull white marble rolled from clay. Marly shook her head. How could anyone have arranged these bits, this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook? But then she nodded. It could be done, she knew; it had been done many years ago by a man named Cornell, who’d also made boxes.

Strangely, it's that the Cornell boxes are convincing enough to be forgeries—e.g. not original art, but rather pastiches of no originality, the work of the academic, the dilettante, the poseur, the forger—that is, for Gibson/Krushkova, somehow evidence of greatness. This doesn't ever seem to be explained or resolved in the novel, but Gibson does explain why the Boxmaker in Count Zero copies Cornell specifically in an interview:

WG: If I was doing a thesis on my work, I would try to figure out what the fuck that Joseph Cornell stuff means in the middle of Count Zero. That’s the key to the whole fucking thing, how the books are put together and everything. But people won’t see it. I think it actually needs someone with a pretty serious art background to understand it. You know, Robert Longo understood that immediately. I was in New York—I’ve got a lot of fans who are fairly heavy New York artists, sort of “fine art guys,” and they got it right away. They read those books around that core. I was actually trying to tell people what I was doing while I was trying to discover it myself.
DWH: It goes back to postmodernism, to pieces again, and to making new wholes from fragments, doesn’t it?
WG: Yeah. It’s sort of like there’s nothing there in the beginning, and you’re going to make something, and you don’t have anything in you to make it out of, particularly, so you start just grabbing little hunks of kipple, and fitting them together, and … (laughing) I don’t know, it seemed profound at the time, but this morning it’s like I can’t even remember how it works.

source: Darren Wershler-Henry, "Queen Victoria's Personal Spook, Psychic Legbreakers, Snakes, and Catfood: An Interiew with William Gibson," Virus 23, Issue 0 (Fall 1989): 28-36.

With this cliffhanger, it’s time to say …  if you want more… you’re going to have to go to the site.

https://varnelis.net/art-and-the-boxmaker/

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