AI Art Movements

How will the ideas of minimalism and maximalism and other artistic philosophies be interpreted in AI art going forward? Will there be movements within the AI art? At this point, AI art defies being labeled. It is certainly an aesthetic movement but not a philosophical movement--yet. I had thought Google DeepDream would establish a Movement for digital art, as fractal art did for a while back in the late 90s. What I've seen of AI art lately reminds me of that and I think it's being generated in the same kind of way where there's there's formulas that are creating the art. It's different in the sense that there's text involved: you can run a text query with keywords and it will create art based on it. That's new. But in terms of it creating a new vibe, say, for example, a minimalism genre in AI art--could you start a sub-genre as minimal AI art, and how could you promote that? In the typical art practice, your overall philosophy is going to make the work look different. That's coming from you and your thoughts. It's not coming from a machine necessarily, but machines are now in the mix and artists have to know when and when not to use AI.

A while back I had watched a documentary about Philip Guston who was a fantastic figurative painter and then he decided that he wanted to pursue abstraction and ultimately that's what he became known for. So if we're making digital art exclusively using AI, how is it that we can do a similar 180 as Guston did? It seems like the AI art world doesn't want to have anything to do with art history and a lot of the people that use it perhaps aren't interested in it. When I started making art I was always interested in the philosophical aspects--even in music I was interested in the philosophical. As regards Guston, his philosophy of art did change--as it has for a lot of artists. He essentially became postmodern. But if you start with postmodernism the only direction you can go is back, and I think a lot of artists do that eventually. When they get older they start to revisit things they used to do--it becomes "neo" something. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years, there will be a Neo-AI movement, and what would that look like?

The whole idea of "neo" and "post" is a philosophical thing. It's not something a machine understands. Supposedly, one could use date metadata as a way to locate various styles in the past, but metadata is typically inaccurate. But it's still coming from a digital space. Our brains aren't digital which gives us the unique capacity for thinking about the philosophical and making a choice about what to make, rather than have machines do it all.