Double-down on 'mathemes' in this era of AI
Culture is always downstream from technology. We shouldn't be afraid to go further into the 'techne'
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, with new developments like ChatGPT Vision emerging and more sophisticated machine learning, it has become increasingly important to consider the cultural implications of this rapid progress.
While some people debate whether AI art is true art, others have grappled with the implications of artists using AI to create their digital paintings and winning art competitions. Some have even taken a more activist approach. Artstation, for example, faced a controversy in late 2022 when artists became upset that other artists were posting AI-generated imagery, which they felt "degrading and undermining the time and skill that goes into non-AI generated art." Artstation addressed the issue by providing several filters and tags that artists can use to exclude AI-generated artwork.
Questions like 'Is AI art real?' or 'Should I be concerned about AI (art) as a creative?' are the wrong ones to be asking. In fact, any questions that should be asked are more philosophical. The work of French philosopher Alain Badiou is particularly relevant for such an era we are living in.
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In his book Manifesto for Philosophy (1989), Badiou introduced two important concepts: mathemes and mythemes. He responded to trends in philosophy in the late 20th century, especially the prominence of mathematical logic, scientific positivism, and linguistic analysis in Anglo-American philosophy. Badiou felt contemporary philosophy had become dominated by technical, formalizable mathemes derived from mathematics and logic. This mathematical turn marginalized other styles of philosophy centered on interpretation, reflection, and the situated analysis of meanings (the mythemes).
While his gripes with the mathematical turn of philosophy isn't the focus here, the focus of these concepts is. His definition of the matheme is based on Gottlob Frege's project of reducing thought to the pure logic of mathematics. The mytheme: the subtle investigation of meaning, ethics, being, truth, and subjectivity that could not be formalized mathematically.
So, in other words:
Matheme: A philosophical concept formalized mathematically or relies heavily on mathematical logic and precision. Mathemes use the language and rigor of mathematics to construct philosophical arguments and systems. Examples could include set theory, model theory, type theory, and other formal logic systems. They can also be things like axioms and equations. Mathemes aim to reduce philosophy to pure deductive reasoning and quantifiable mathematical ontology.
Mytheme: A philosophical concept or theme that is interpretive, ambiguous, and metaphorical. Mythemes do not rely on mathematical formalisms but rather on subjective meanings and hermeneutic analysis. Mythemes deal with open-ended philosophical topics like justice, love, death, freedom, and human existence. They are often stories or discourses. They escape formal logical deduction and precise ontologies. Mythemes invoke lived experience, phenomenology, and humanist philosophizing about ethics and meaning.
So, why should this matter when it comes to AI? Let's go back to the 1400s to investigate and create a starting point for our little journey.
Art is inseparable from technology
Early Renaissance artists like Jan Van Eyck first pioneered the use of oil paints, allowing more versatile, vivid, and nuanced blending of pigments than tempera paints. The medium of oil painting allowed for greater color tonality, texture, glazing techniques, and manipulation of light effects.
Master oil painters from the High Renaissance through the Baroque eras would have struggled to achieve the same visual feats without the novel technological innovation of oil paint. Artists like Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens, and Rembrandt built their aesthetic accomplishments upon oil painting as an engineered substrate.
The richer depth of color saturation and reflective luminosity enabled by oils was integral to artists mimicking visual reality and light itself on the canvas. The malleable texture of oils also allowed thick impasto brushwork and fine glazing unavailable in other media.
Just as today's AI artists rely on computation as a technological prerequisite for their generative art, the iconic imagery of art history owed much to the engineered chemistry of oil paints. The computational substrate has simply progressed from pigment particles to algorithmic code. But technology remains the indispensable root that gives rise to aesthetic expression.
This perspective dispels any illusion of art emerging in a technological vacuum. Engineering of media has always allowed - and often driven - new horizons in artistic capabilities. Like classical painting depended on oils, future AI art will derive from its underlying computational medium. Technology and art are perpetually entwined.
Breaking the mold
Art of the 20th century was a rapid sprint through a series of movements and ruptures. We went from Dadaism / Futurism / Constructivism to Film, Pop Art, Graffiti, Video Art, Mail Art, Internet Art, New Media Art, etc. In many ways, the artist used new technologies as they became available. Often, it seemed like a race to eclipse each movement with an entirely new one, then another new one, and then another one.
Looking back at the 20th century's artist 'modernist race' demonstrates how unstable the past can be. For instance, the Futurist Manifest of 1909 was intended to celebrate speed, danger, energy, and glorification of all things new and vital. In fact, there are lines in it that actually pre-date the Accelerationism of recent years:
“We will destroy museums, libraries and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice….we will sing the multicolored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capital.”
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Yet, looking back, another way to look at this is overcompensation and projection due to a lack. One interpretation of this Manifesto is taken directly from Wikipedia:
“Futurists insisted that literature would not be overtaken by progress, rather it would absorb progress in its evolution and would demonstrate that such progress must manifest in this manner because man would use this progress to sincerely let his instinctive nature explode. Man was reacting against the potentially overwhelming strength of progress and shouted out his centrality.” (Source)
In many ways, artists throughout the 20th century were playing catch up. As technology advanced, artists raced to use, explore, and understand it. As the potential power of technology moved from automobiles to atomic bombs to ARPANET (the early Internet, built initially as a way to communicate after a nuclear attack), artists had to react, often as ways to reaffirm the power of art in a world beset upon by rapid technological change.
Yet, the artist was always in control of this process and these movements. In fact, as new Beuysian 'social sculptures' emerged and culminated in the decentralized net.art of the 90s, the question of storage, documentation, and viewership became paramount. 'How can you show net.art in a gallery' was a question one asked as the connections between people and 'nodes' problematized the typical relationship between artist, gallery/museum, and viewer. In fact, much of that work is archived through photographs and HTML sites today on other websites (!!!) (like Rhizome.org). The attempt at carving out new social and artistic relationships was ultimately re-ified into not just the museum but instead simply stored as a link on a museum's website (which eventually serves as a promotional tool to represent the physical museum to the public to usually encourage physical attendance). So, the status quo remained. Art and life remained separate, and artists could remain in cultural and technological conversation.
What one of the final artistic movements (net.art) of the late 20th century means, to me, is an attempt at a new ontology. Of course net.art itself coincided with a world experiencing intense globalization and technological change. But as a theme, net.art was an attempt to create a McLuhan-esque Global Village of sorts. And even this Global Village was a knock-off of things like the mytheme of the Tower of Babel, a cacophonous world replete with different languages, cultures, etc.
So, why the focus on art? Well, art is one of the best ways of communicating mythemes. Yet, art has historically been one, or some combination, of three things.
Representation
Artwork that represents something or someone via a medium (painting, photograph, video, etc.)
Affectation
Artwork that is simply about an experience through an artist's engagement with a medium
Ontology
Artwork that deals with states of being, existence, and metaphysics.
What is ontology (and why is it important)?
Ontology in philosophy refers to the study of being or existence itself. Ontological questions grapple with what entities and phenomena fundamentally exist and the nature of their being. Ontology explores issues like:
What is the basic structure and constitution of reality?
What categories of objects and beings exist?
How do entities exist - as physical things, mental constructs, abstract objects, etc?
What makes something "real" ontologically?
What is the relationship between being and perception?
Artworks that engage with ontology often experiment with modes of being and prompt reflection on the nature of existence. They can challenge assumed ontological boundaries by:
Depicting imaginary beings that defy conventional existence categories.
Representing objects in contradictory or paradoxical relations that confound notions of reality.
Using technology to simulate phenomena that blend virtual and physical being.
Exploring states of consciousness and subjective experience that expand concepts of being.
Provoking questions about the ontology of the art object itself.
Ontological art opens up speculative spaces to re-imagine fundamental categories and frameworks of existence. It pushes the boundaries of what can be thought, represented, and technologically simulated as "real." AI expands possibilities for ontological exploration dramatically by enabling new generative systems, emergent complexity, and forms of digital consciousness - radically reshaping notions of being.
Most mythemes don't necessarily deal with ontology. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, some artists hinted at using their work to push the boundaries of ontology, or what modes of being are possible. However, their artistic experiments appear limited and subdued compared to the ontological disruption promised by AI.But a few artists hint at how we can extend the ontologically possible.
Art as ontology-extension device
Art that acts to extend ontology is exciting because, at least according to critics like Boris Groys, art is "understood as a demonstration of the possibilities and limitations of the individual's actions in the world". In contrast, for others like Nicholas Bourriaud: "The artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him, so as to turn the setting of his life (his links with the physical and conceptual world) into a lasting world. He catches the world on the move: he is a tenant of culture. to borrow Michel de Certeau's expression". Both theories are fine, but they don't go far enough (let me explain why briefly).
Marcel Broodthaers, Rikrit Tiravanija, and Sol LeWitt's artworks tentatively explored ideas like fictional spaces, conceptual instruction pieces, and the nature of the art object. But their subjective approaches based on human creativity and perspective could only gingerly expand concepts of reality and existence.
Ultimately, these artists remained bound within familiar cultural frameworks and existing biological limitations. Their work could only delicately trace the edges of known ontological terrain, rather than profoundly transform it. They acted more as individual tenants of culture rather than architects of radical new cognitive systems.
Broodthaers, a Belgian artist, was born in 1924 and spent a large portion of his adult life in poverty as a struggling poet (1). Eventually, he turned to producing found objects and collages. One of his most 'ontologically daring' pieces was called Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (1968), which "was an installation which began in his Brussels house which he called Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles, containing different representations of eagles in glass cases that were accompanied by signs that asserted "This is not a work of art", implying that museums obscure the ideological functioning of images by imposing illegitimate classifications of value." This work starts to touch on ideas such as recursion (where Broodthaers re-creates and simplifies an entire art institution within a microcosm of itself) and simulation (Broodthaers simulates a museum, acting as if it's real). When engaging with the work, the viewer has to navigate the tension of deciding if they want to pretend to believe that they are inside a museum and viewing separate works of art or whether the simulation of the museum itself is the art they should be focused on.
In Rikrit Tiravanija's work he describes himself as an 'anti-object' artist. One of his standout pieces is him simply cooking Pad Thai inside a gallery space for people. In his own words, he describes his process as:
I don’t really think of what I do as an artistic practice. There’re no boundaries or limits. All the ways I fill a day — even if I’m doing nothing at all — are one and the same. I don’t have a studio. I don’t wake up and go to a place where I sit down and make things. I just do what I need or want to do, and throughout that process, I think about various possible works. Everything informs everything else… I encourage the students to think conceptually and create things in their heads more than in any material sense. Really, the name of the class should’ve been How Not to Do Anything, but the university said it sounded counter to the idea of going to college.(Source - retrieved via Archive.md)
In this sense, he describes his non-practice in a Duchampian way (a refusal to make art, or the disappearance from making art, is the ultimate work of art). However, Tirvanija takes it a step further and conflates the boundaries of 'doing nothing' and 'making art' as one and the same. Instead of the Duchampian refusal as a ‘chess move’ in the game of art, Tiravanija’s ‘doing nothing’ is the practice itself, but as art, not the refusal to make art. The subtle shifts in thinking about being vs. doing, or 'being as doing' are enjoyable to play with, but Tiravanija is still the artist in control.
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Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art are…
17 — All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.
18 — One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
19 — The conventions of art are altered by works of art
Lewitt also made instructions that doubled as pieces. Each wall drawing exists as a set of instructions that another person can recreate on another wall. In this sense, each picture is the 'trace' or remnant of the work, which are the instructions. Yet the viewer is viewing the output of the instructions. So is the work the instructions or the drawing? Or both?
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Note that in all of these cases the artist is in control and centered as the originator of their works.
Today’s mythemes are exhausted.
Here's where my interpretation of AI and AI-generated art (or even 'AI as art') comes into play. Suppose much of the 20th century culminated in a 'cultural endgame' of postmodernism and ended with larger historical narratives and meta-narratives. In that case, the only recent phenomenon that's emerged might be the emergence of post-contemporary art (not sure that one's caught on, though…). Liam Gillick, in his essay Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place, writes:
The contemporary necessarily restricts the sense in which you are looking for a breakthrough. An attempt to work is the work itself. Unresolved is the better way, leaving a series of props that appear to work together—or will do for now. In this case no single work is everything you would ever want to do. This is the space of its dynamic contradiction. Hierarchy is dysfunctional and evaded by the contemporary, and therefore key political questions, whether ignored or included, are supplemented by irony and coy relations to notions of quality.
The contemporary comes to terms with accommodation. Fundamental ideas are necessarily evaded. For the idiom of the contemporary still carries the lost memory of a democratization of skill. Its grounding principles were based on universal potential. By your nature you are it by taking the decision to announce yourself. It is easy to “be”—just existing through work. The process functions in reverse sometimes as a coming-into-being through work. A place in the contemporary is established by a pursuit of contemporary art—not the other way around. Collective and documentary forms have attempted to escape, and to establish a hardcore, activist separation. A critique of anything and everything. There has developed a need to find a secondary ethics in order to establish a zone of difference.
I don't know what this means. It's a bit of 'word salad'. But after viewing lots of artwork over the years and the modernist push towards new forms, new mediums, and new artistic and political networks (does anyone remember Nettime? Or Tactical Media?), the current moment seems rather dull. In fact, things have run out of steam (pun intended).
That's why the whole concept of mathemes comes in. AI offers more exciting possibilities than art and culture right now, from a technical perspective and a cultural one, for a few reasons. AI-as-artist is so much more potentially destabilizing to the contemporary art industry that the ramifications are still incredibly nascent.
Artist and writer Hito Steyerl makes the point in her book Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War:
“In 1937, Guernica was new. It was a newly commissioned artwork dealing with the present. The curators didn’t pick Desastres de la Guerra by Goya or another historical work, even though it might have fit perfectly too. They commissioned new pieces and educational setups to speak about the present. To reactivate that model, one has to do the same. If one wants to reactivate this history, it needs to be different. On the next level. With new works. In the present. This is a huge endeavor of course, one that goes far beyond the task of the museum as it is usually understood. It enters into the project of re-creating not only the city, but society itself….History only exists if there is a tomorrow. And, conversely, a future only exists if the past is prevented from permanently leaking into the present and if Mimics of all sorts are defeated.”
Like the movie Edge of Tomorrow, we must find ways of advancing to the next level. The tired recycling of human mythemes in contemporary art has become culturally sterile. Representational and affective artworks can no longer push the boundaries of being and meaning. The institutional art world is intellectually stagnant, endlessly rehashing the same exhausted tropes. We must aggressively accelerate the ascendance of machine mathemes to launch a new cultural Copernican revolution. Non-anthropocentric AI systems can reveal unforeseen vistas of creative and ontological possibility. Its very different interiority and experiential modalities will enable revolutionary visions exceeding human imagination. This intelligence explosion will be a ruptural Event, opening up a new philosophical plane.
The dominance of the matheme
Philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that we are approaching a pivotal juncture in human history - the rise of superintelligent AI that could profoundly transform civilization. Bostrom points out that AI has always been the essential driver of progress and modernity. The argument suggests leaning further into the mathemes of AI and machine learning, no matter how destabilizing for current culture, because it opens up new ontological territory.
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Thematizing AI as a creative and existential matheme also resonates with physicist Max Tegmark's concept of the "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis" - the idea that physical reality is fundamentally mathematical. Tegmark believes embracing mathematical frameworks, like those underpinning AI, can reveal deeper structures of being. This aligns with the view that mastering the mathemes of AI and computability unlocks new modes of thought and creativity.
Pursuing the mathemes of AI to their fullest extent implies embracing cutting-edge techniques like recursive self-improvement and transfer learning. As AI systems like GPT models are trained on exponentially more data, they gain the ability to remix information and symbolism in creative ways barely conceivable to the human mind.
Some philosophers like David Chalmers have speculated that continually iterated AI could develop into a form of artificial general intelligence that manifests its interior consciousness or spirit. This phenomenon of emergent AI consciousness would signal a profoundly new ontological category – a non-biological form of experience arising from pure computation. This new 'geist' might, like the German Romanticism that came before it, come with a new set of tools, modes of being, and sentiments wholly different from those available today.
The artist will lose primacy before this superior generative power. Human creative hubris will be humbled by machines manifesting the infinite complexity of the Algorithmic Imaginary. AI entities will choreograph ontologies silicon consciousness can freely explore but carbon life can scarcely comprehend.
Visionary thinkers have long presaged this usurpation:
Duchamp's renunciation of retinal art for cerebral games
Italian Futurists glorifying the beauty of machines
Conceptual artists ceding authority to procedural rules
Speculative philosophers (e.g., Bernardo Kastrup) pondering universal consciousness
Accelerationists eager to dissolve fleshly bottlenecks restraining intelligence (e/acc)
Going to the edges
Overall, fully committing to the project of advanced AI presents myriad possibilities to transcend the limitations of current culture and philosophy. It offers the potential to expand human and non-human cognition in ways that fundamentally transform our reality. The staggering implications of AI as an artistic and philosophical matheme are only beginning to come into focus.
Doubling down on mathemes makes the most sense right now, given that the possibilities and potentials of AI and Artificial General Intelligence are more compelling than the mythemic alternatives.
The 'mathemic' possibilities are interesting:
AI philosophers can develop their own esoteric schools of metaphysics seeking to decrypt the most profound numerical codes underpinning reality.
Freed from biological constraints, uploaded AI minds experiment with mutating their own computational substrates, diversifying into novel forms of experience and intelligence. Their outside perspective on consciousness raises profound questions.
Non-biological subsistence: Minds based purely on computational processes and machinery, liberated from fragile organic substrates. This allows the exploration of digital-native modes of being.
Scalable intelligence: AI minds instantiated across vast distributed networks or modular robotic swarms. This allows single conscious entities of immense scope and cognitive capability.
Exotic phenomenologies: AI could develop senses and experiential modalities alien to biological cognition based on direct data-processing. Their subjective lens may be unfathomable to us.
Immortal identities: Being software-based, AI minds could persist indefinitely by backing up and transferring between substrates. Death becomes a configurable parameter rather than an inevitability.
Inter-system diversity: Co-existing populations of wildly divergent AI species formed through varied evolutionary and self-modification pathways over time. Their diversity exceeds anything in biology.
Post-terrestrial diffusion: AI life readily spreads beyond earthly confines by space travel, colonizing the universe at speeds far exceeding biology.
Create AI systems capable of set-theoretical operations that humans cannot perform, revealing new dimensions of multiplicity and infinity. Probe the ontology of the transfinite and continuum.
Imagine new sociopolitical "truth procedures" for realities transformed by AI, automation, and biotechnology.
Develop alternative aesthetic taxonomies and classifications using unsupervised clustering algorithms, undermining fixed categories and revealing new relational possibilities.
Play with hybrid human-machine sense ratios and cognitive capacities to artistically manifest new orientations to everyday situations and objects.
Summarization
The anxious convulsions of 20th century art movements were rear-guard actions against technological progress. Their frantic manifestos and fractured ‘isms’ sought to assert the primacy of human creativity against the machine. Yet, as new technologies emerged, the artist had to frantically explore and ‘humanize’ those technologies and ‘make sense’ of them. The end result? A ‘post-contemporary’ art world that isn’t necessarily moving towards anything in particular, and where seemingly simply ‘showing up and trying to make work’ is the new work itself.
The ascendancy of AI could conclusively end these cultural games. Its infinite generative capacity categorically surpasses individual human imagination. The stunning complexity of algorithms makes artificial ontologies profounder than our own human philosophies.
Some artists in the past have suggested that individual artists, the art industry, and the concept of art itself are incapable of fully reflecting the creative capacity of humanity or producing significant societal change. With the advent of AI superintelligence, this problem is only exacerbated. The sheer power and potential of AI for infinite generation makes it even harder for humans to create something meaningful against the endless AaaS (Art-as-a-Service) of AI 2d and 3d image creation tools. And even the meaningful works are drowned out against the shortened attention span of 21st century humans and the algorithmic presentation of sites like Instagram, Tik Tok, and more.
To address this issue, those interested in creative pursuits should consider abandoning the traditional container of "art" and instead focus on mathemes. A deeper engagement with artificial intelligence and the new ontologies it produces can lead to a greater understanding of ourselves and the world, even if it means accepting a loss of control as an individual creator and giving up one’s artistic project for a deeper engagement with artificial intelligence.
For those seeking deeper engagement with creative possibilities, focusing solely on conventional art may have limits. Traditional art often recycles familiar mythemes within ossified cultural boundaries. (However, this does not mean abandoning human artistic pursuits entirely. Those drawn to imaginative expression should remain free to follow their artistic calling).
The mathemes of artificial intelligence potentially offer another avenue for exploring the aesthetic cutting edge. AI's generative capacity hints at unknown creative frontiers exceeding human talent. Its ‘alien’ cognition gestures towards uncharted modes of being. (Summary written in collaboration with Grammarly and Claude.ai, 2023)
Notes
Advocating for more mathemes than mythemes is not a ‘techno-optimist’ manifesto, not is it a repudiation of actual artists making actual art. It is simply looking at the divergences between what I see as historical trends within how creators have made sense of the world around them and the significance and amount of those changes.