1

(Un)creative Artificial Intelligence: A Critique of

'Artificial Art'

Dieter Mersch

I
The arguments that follow are situated within a larger project entitled
"Critique of Algorithmic Rationality."1 That project, drawing deliberately
from Immanuel Kant, is an attempt to move beyond the technological, social
or cultural critiques of digital rationalities usually found in social, media and
cultural theories and take a critical look at the validity of algorithmic
approaches. It explores the limitations of the performance and purview of
algorithmic schematics and is therefore grounded in a critique of
mathematical reasoning.2 This investigation explicitly refrains from power
analyses of digital surveillance structures and ignores critiques of
disciplinary and controlling societies that draw from Michel Foucault and
Gilles Deleuze as well as economic analyses of "data capitalist" value
creation, which is not to suggest that those analyses are without relevance.
At disposition is neither applications nor practical alternatives but—
analogous to the Critique of Pure Reason—the limits of algorithmic thought.
I speak of "rationality" rather than "reason" in order to highlight the formal
and "instrumental" character of this type of operation, which is currently
conquering not only the world and reality as a whole, but also our selves, our
bodies as well as our thinking, feeling, and knowing.3 As the same time, it is
permeating aesthetic practices of design and creativity, and the idea of
"making art" in general.
In his defense of the validity of "pure reason" against a program of
excessive rationality, Kant of course not only postulated the difference

1
See Dieter Mersch, "Ideen zu einer ‚Kritik algorithmischer Rationalität," Deutsche
Zeitschrift für Philosophie 67, no. 5 (2019): 851-873; "Kreativität und Künstliche
Intelligenz. Einige Bemerkungen zu einer Kritik algorithmischer Rationalität," Zeitschrift
für Medienwissenschaft 2 (2019): 65-74.; "Digital Lifes. Überlegungen zu den Grenzen
algorithmischer Rationalisierung," in Augmentierte und virtuelle Wirklichkeiten, ed.
Andreas Beinsteiner et al (Innsbruck: Universitäts-Verlag, 2020), 53-76.
2
Stephen Cole Kleene, Introduction to Metamathematics (Groningen: Wolters Noordhof
Publishing, 1971), 36ff.
3
On rationality vs. reason in this context see in particular Max Horkheimer, Critique of
Instrumental Reason, trans. Matthew O'Connell (London: Verso, 2012). See also the
editorial of the Internationalen Jahrbuchs für Medienphilosophie, vol. 6, Berlin 2020
(forthcoming).
 2

between noumenon and phainomenon, as well as the unknowability of the

thing-in-itself, but also explained the same with the a priori synthesis of
apperception and concept and—at least in his first (edition A) version of
"transcendental deduction"—in particular with the constitutive role of
"imagination."4 All cognition stems from this synthetic productivity, which
in turn is kept in check by the categorization of concepts of understanding.
Imagination—in the classic meaning of Pico della Mirandola's and Marsilio
Ficino's imaginatio—functions in particular as the site of creativity. For
Kant, it is the intermediate between perception and understanding; it is
responsible for the formation and consolidation of manifold manifestations
into a coherent impression, and also for the construction of a general outline
or 'schemata'. In this way, according to Kant, we are first able to become
aware of and classify and thus perceive things and objects–one could also
speak of their diagramatization, whereby the delineation of the schema
involves, not only but mainly, its geometrization and mathematization.5 At
the same time, there is something within the schemata that eludes linearity
(the form as medium for a general abstraction), namely the excess of
formation itself; for that which gives form, the praxis of design, may be
grounded in general principles of construction but occludes its own
construction. Every construction of construction defies its own principles,
every totalization that also attempts to rule over that which constitutes the
rules falls instead into the trap of its own exaggeration.
We will return to this fundamental idea again and again. The core of
the imagination of a schema is something other than the schema itself,
something which makes schematization possible, but is not an inherent part
of it. We might also speak here of an erratic "intuition," of the phantasia that
first creates phenomena, or of an "inspiration" or inspiratio in the literal
meaning of inhalation in the sense of ensoulment—“Begeisterung” as
formulated by Georg Friedrich Hegel—stressing the eminently passive sense
of the word. We can also express this as follows: imagination surpasses all
formalism, especially because it is grounded in an Other, an alterity that in
turn is captured neither by concept nor by definition but has its roots in a
"beyond" that comes to us, that turns us around, and must be caught hold of
in order to make us other than we are.
Thus from the onset we are confronted with the problem and the
riddle of creativity. The argumentation that follows aims first, always
following Kant, to show that creativity—or imagination—is an indispensable
moment of all thought, no matter how formal. Second, it endeavors to give

4
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 127-162.
5
See Martin Beck, "Konstruktion und Entäußerung. Zur Logik der Bildlichkeit bei Kant und
Hegel" (PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 2018).
 3

creativity its rightful place at the heart of synthesis, and thus of all judgment
and cognition as well as all meaning and understanding. Third, in a shift from
the Critique of Pure Reason to a Critique of Algorithmic Rationality, it
assumes that while creativity is necessary to every form of mathematical
proof, computation, formalization, and calculation, it can nevertheless be
demonstrated that, fourth, while it makes both mathematical and algorithmic
thought possible, it cannot itself be mathematized or algorithmized. My
assertion is therefore that there is a fundamental limit to all algorithmics, the
litmus test (and not ruler) of which is creativity. Chiefly we shall see that
while something new or unprecedented can of course be made by
algorithms—which remains unspectacular as long as we have not defined the
concept of the new—the concept of creativity is no more equivalent to the
production of newness than, conversely, such novelty, when created or
invented, can, as this novelty or as a creative invention in the proper sense,
be adequately evaluated or judged algorithmically. From that follows, firstly,
that the concept of creativity, if it is to be useful for thought and definition or
for judging and synthesis, must be greatly expanded (or, to speak
metamathematically, be "essentially richer" than the constructive production
of novelty). Furthermore, every act of creativity must at the same time
comprise an ability to be evaluated as a creation if we want to be able to
distinguish between something new that is interesting enough to be appraised
and appreciated as such and that which we can call a "trivial novelty," which
may simply be a product of chance or an anomaly.
The latter condition in particular implies that every creatio—like all
human thought incidentally—necessarily includes a moment of reflectio; that
creativity itself presupposes not only a capacity for intuition or imagination,
but also, as we shall see, for reflexivity. These ideas lead further to the
assumption of the principal incommensurability of human reason and
algorithmic rationality. Therefore even if machines can at some future point
be considered to be "thinking," it will always only be "another kind of
thinking" or "something other than thinking"—an act that is best described
not with cognitive vocabulary but rather as that which it obviously is: a type
of formalism without a sense of the formality of formalization itself. Put
another way, the process has an element of recursiveness, but not of
reflexivity; yet it is the latter which is a condition for the possibility of that
which we signify as thought, as cognition, knowledge or perception, but also
as invention and creativity, for thinking is first and foremost always ‘thinking
of thinking’, just as perception is always ‘perception of perception’. One
could even go a step further: not only can machines not be creative, they are
completely unable to think, just as little as they possess consciousness or
semantics or pragmatics, because all of these concepts, like art, are
fundamentally grounded in the social. They presuppose alterity.
 4

II
These deliberations begin with a text that not only made a key
contribution to metamathematical explanations of calculability, decidability,
and provability, but also marks one of the beginnings of the computer era
itself; namely Alan Turing's 1938 dissertation, Systems of Logic Based on
Ordinals.6 Turing's text was a reaction to the consequences of Kurt Gödel's
epochal incompleteness theorem of 1931, which demonstrated the
impossibility of a total formalization of sufficiently complex mathematical
systems containing a certain amount of arithmetic, and in so doing shook the
foundations of Hilbert's program. If there is no formal derivation for every
true theorem, we are confronted with a fatal limitation of mathematical
reason itself. Turing attempted to cushion this result by creating a sequence
of logical systems that become increasingly "complete." From each System
L, a more complete System L' is derived, from which L'' is deduced, etc. This
creates a hierarchy of levels, whereby it can of course be asked whether the
end result is complete formalization, the answer to which, as in Gödel's
theorem, is "no," for the transition from L to L' to L'', etc. do not allow for
any strict operative constructivism. Instead Turing speaks of an "oracle" that
"cannot be a machine; with the help of the oracle we could form a new kind
of machine."7 Or, to come back to our original point, there is no general rule
for the transition from one formal system of logic to the next, but only an
intuition or a creative invention.
For Turing, "oracle" was a denotation for divination or an intuition
that solves problems not by proofs, but by leaps. An "oracle machine" in
Turing's sense would therefore be an algorithm that finds a solution in one
step, without running through computations. That means that mathematical
solutions necessitate non-mathematical invention or creativity as an essential
condition for finding new paths outside of formalized schemata. We are
therefore, one could say, dealing with a system of determinist machines
between which exists a non-determinist "leap" (Sprung), a transition that is
itself not logically deducible, but happens abruptly, "without transition." I
have called this a ‘leap’ in order to mark its fundamental unignorable
indetermination. It is also a paradox, because the direction is not
predetermined; a leap can only land as long as it knows nothing of the how
and where the transition will occur. For this reason, the only way to
reconstruct a leap is aesthetically. Here aesthetics is understood as itself a
praxis without rules, since there is no rule for a transition from one logical
system to another—it must first be invented. Its inventio is the "event"

6
Alan Turing, “Systems of Logic based on Ordinals,” Proceedings of the London
Mathematical Society 2. vol. 45 (1939), https://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~acm/turing-phd.pdf.
7
Ibid, p. 42–43.
 5

(Ereignis), that is to say it is not born of inferential derivation, but springs,

aporetically, from "transitionless transitions." In between are neither
causalities or a teleology, but at most a crack, a caesura, over which a leap
must be taken. Thus, mathematics manifests itself as a creative act that has
its foundation in both mechanisms and a certain illogical spontaneity. It is
based—as postulated by intuitionism, one of the most influential
philosophies of mathematics, to which Gödel also more or less adhered—on
both formal and logical operations as well as on a series of abductive or
intuitive acts that do not follow any mathematical calculations as such.
Rather, they presuppose, to speak with Kant, a "free" and "reflective
judgment," which Kant denoted "aesthetical."8 "Mathematical reasoning,"
Turing said analogously, "may be regarded rather schematically as the
exercise of a combination of two faculties, which we may call intuition and
ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous
judgments, which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. These
judgments are often, but by no means invariably, correct (leaving aside the
question as to what is meant by ‘correct’).” Turing continued, “I shall not
attempt to explain this idea of ‘intuition’ any more explicitly. The exercise of
ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable
arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.
… The parts played by these two faculties differ of course from occasion to
occasion, and from mathematician to mathematician.”9
Put another way, the evolution of The Mathematical Experience, as
Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh have called that unique and unparalleled
ensemble of knowledge that is necessary to itself, nevertheless remains an
"ensemble" that can be neither systematized from above nor standardized.
Mathematics cannot be delineated with a universally valid formal language—
as the failed utopia of Hilbert's program insinuated—but is rooted in a
"poetics of findings," which makes it equal parts science and art. This poetics
remains incomplete, a fragmented patchwork that does not reveal an overall
pattern, but at best comes together as an open collection in which all elements
are nevertheless in the right place and without alternative. From time to time
it may be expanded, or interstices can be filled, but only to reveal new gaps
that in turn cannot be mastered using systematic methods. While algorithms
can be specified and precise machines built that produce results in a certain
and clearly defined way, there is no meta-algorithm, no mathematical
machine of all machines that can generate all possible true statements or
progress deductively from one system to another. While they seem to be able
to deduce everything that can be represented within a system, they cannot
decide whether it is representable. John von Neumann has explained

8
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tran. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1987), part V of the Introduction and Book II, §24.
9
Turing, Systems of Logic based on Ordinals, p. 57.
 6

accordingly, in reference to the structure of mathematical logic, "you can

construct an automaton which can do anything any automaton can do, but
you cannot construct an automaton which will predict the behavior of any
arbitrary automation. In other words, you can build an organ which can do
anything that can be done, but you cannot build an organ which tells you
whether it can be done.” And, furthermore: “The feature is just this, that you
can perform within the logical type that’s involved everything that’s feasible,
but the question of whether something is feasible in a type belongs to a higher
logical type.”10
It is thus similar to a fairy tale, in which the fairy perhaps grants our
wish, but she does not tell us what we should wish. The term "poetics" is
meant to capture this, for what we wish presupposes an equal share of both
reflexivity and judgment. It follows that the "poetic" belongs in the realm of
neither logic nor machines, but is a question of art as well as morality and
our understanding of the meaning of life. Similarly, that which is calculable
and that which is not cannot be subjected to further algorithmization; it shows
itself, pointing toward that which proves to be "uncalculable."
Uncalculability is more than simply a negation of calculability. It denotes
that which in no way conforms to the schemata of a computation—more
similar to the "troublesome nowhere" than the "empty too much" where, as
Rainer Maria Rilke states in his Fifth Duino Elegy, the "many-placed
calculation is exactly resolved."11

III
That is not to say that there has been any lack of attempts to
nevertheless mathematize the jumps and cracks that do not want to be pinned
down, and to found algorithmic theories of creativity. Such theories are also
interested in the possibilities of computer-generated art. If an algorithmic
simulation of thought were to succeed, then the algorithmic replication of the
phenomenon of creativity must also be possible. Hence, we are dealing not
only with a question of algorithmic aesthetics, but more importantly with the
question of whether strong artificial intelligence can exist at all. Attempts to
answer this question and to create a corresponding "artificial art" go as far
back as the 1960s.12 These approaches rallied in particular against
subjectivity in art, falsely ascribed to the avant-garde, countering with an
"objective aesthetics" as laid out in George David Birkhoff's quantitative

10
Von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, ed. Arthur W. Banks (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1966), 51.
11
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. A. Kline (BOD: Poetry in
Translation, 2001); 30.
12
See Georg Nees, "Artificial Art and Artificial Intelligence," in Bilder Images Digital
(Munich: Barke-Verlag, 1986) 58–67.
 7

aesthetic measure.13 Birkhoff's simple formula, MÄ = O/C, provided the

foundation; setting order (O) and complexity (C) in an inverse ratio. The
more order and the less complexity an artwork exhibits, the higher its value,
which in turn falls with rising complexity and a lower ordering of chaos.
Birkhoff, using heuristic, statistical calculations of the amount of order and
complexity, applied this formula to simplified examples such as vases,
polyhedra, and the like. Artworks were not paradigmatic in this aesthetic
theory, which did not stop Max Bense, an adherent of rationalism, from using
a syncretic mix of semiotics and information theory to extrapolate an "exact"
theory of art he termed "microaesthetics."14 Working with Claude Shannon's
Mathematical Theory of Communication and Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics,
Bense transformed Birkhoff's measure by replacing order and complexity
with fictitious quantities such as "redundancy of information" (R) and "true
information content" (Hi), creating his own formula for determining a
supposedly more exact measure of creativity, MÄ = R/Hi.15 Redundancy, that
is repeatability and thus the ability to communicate a recognizable order, has
the position of the numerator and is thus the dominant measure of creativity
or originality, while the true information content becomes the denominator,
so that a work is better understood with increasing redundancy and becomes
more opaque the more information it contains. Redundancy, as Bense
explicated in "Small Abstract Aesthetics" in 1969, "means a kind of counter‐
concept to the concept of information … in that it does not designate the
innovation value of a distribution of elements but the ballast value of this
innovation, which accordingly is not new but is well known, which does not
provide information but identification."16
Here not only the hypothetical character of such speculations become
obvious, but also the aim: to preclude an excess of creativity in order to
enable digital art that has a guarantee of readability. Any art that desired
acceptance would have to adhere to this normative balance. And in fact, this
has been the unspoken premise of almost all mathematical descriptions of
artistic processes ever since. It has also been the consistent demise of "art
from the computer."17 For this theory leads to the curious conclusion that an
aesthetic object can only truly be appreciated when it is neither too simple
nor too complex. The ideal ratio has even been set at around 37%—a number

13
On the theory of the avant-garde see also Mersch, Ereignis und Aura, Untersuchungen
zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2002), esp. 188ff.
14
Bense, "Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik," in Ausgewählte Schriften
vol. 3. )Stuttgart: Metzler-Verlag, 1998), 255-336.; 315ff.
15
Ibid., 316-7. See also Bense "Small Abstract Aesthetics" in A Companion to Digital Art,
ed. Christiane Paul (West Sussex: Wiley, 2016), 249-264; 256-7.
16
Ibid.
17
See Dieter Mersch, "Benses existenzieller Rationalismus. Philosophie, Semiotik und
exakte Ästhetik," In Max Bense. Weltprogrammierung, ed. Elke Uhl and Claus Zittel
(Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag 2018), 61-81.
 8

that not only divulges the rigorous restrictions of such aesthetic theories, but
also remains highly fictitious, because there is no possibility of creating a
scale via clearly defined units of measure. Such expositions are useful at best
for statistical programming, such as those undertaken by Georg Nees, A.
Michael Noll, and, in his early work, Frieder Nake, the "3N" computer
pioneers who still believed in the revolutionary input of algorithms.
Something was first made to conform to a theory of statistical probability and
then the same basis was used to automatically implement and uphold the
same. Nees's "generative graphics" suffice as an example. These images,
created with the Zuse Graphomat Z64, present for example groups of lines
distributed across a plane, mathematically generated by defining a series of
brandom numbers of points, directions, and lengths that together produce the
intersecting vectors.18 The resulting image is a net of crossed lines, like
another, similarly generated, image of well-ordered small squares whose
position becomes increasingly "discombobulated." Order transitions into
chaos and chaos into orders, similar to the way in which 2-D images create

18
See Georg Nees, Generative Computergraphik (Munich: Barke Verlag, 1969).
 9

3-D effects or 3-D structures appear to be 2-D surfaces (Fig 1: Georg Nees,
Squares). For Nees, the aim was to use the machine make something not
technical, but "'useless'— geometrical patterns."19 But by no means did he
accept every result. If there was an overgrowth of complexity or if—for
example due to computer errors—chaos erupted, he interrupted the process,
so that in the end it was in fact the power of human aesthetic judgment that
laid the ground rules.20
In general, it would be a mistake to speak of "creative computers" in
this case, because they have yet to meet the criteria for creativity, replacing
it instead with randomizers. Variation shifts from invention to stochastics.
Generated randomness does not imply, as in the work of John Cage or in the
radical aleatoric of Kurt Schwitters, Pierre Boulez or Earle Brown, a literal
rushing headlong into Nothingness.21 It is not a roll of the dice that privileges
the event, but rather chance that has been constructed by rules or by
mathematical laws, whether through the use of probability functions, or the
development of a series of transcendent irrational numbers or the Monte
Carlo method or some such. Instead of "negative rules" that simple create a
frame for the improbable, we are dealing only with "positive rules" with a
disposition to fill a previously empty field with postulates.22 To this end,
Markov chains are usually employed, since with little information they can
forecast future developments on the basis of statistical processes and their
properties, thus predicting the dynamic evolution of objects and events. But
there are other factors at play beside systematized chance, for example
properties of the system such as "emergence," "mutations", or "fitness" in an
analogy to biological evolution, as well as the compression of data into
patterns extracted from larger amounts of other data.23 Consequently, the act
of creatio dwindles to the mathematical simulation of "novelty," which can
mean nothing other than the derivation of an element that was not contained
within the previous information. It does not point toward the future, but is
rather a distillation of the past, to which is merely added a formal negation,
namely the property of noncontainment. All future attempts to generate
artificial inspiration are bound to fundamentally follow the same path, if with

19
Georg Nees, The Great Temptation exhibition at ZKM, 2006,
https://zkm.de/en/event/2006/08/georg-nees-the-great-temptation
20
See for example Frieder Nake, "Computer Art: Where’s the Art?" in Bilder Images
Digital. Computerkünstler in Deutschland 1986 (Munich: Barke-Verlag, 1986), 69–73.
21
"Zu-Fallen des Nichts" see Mersch, Ereignis und Aura, 278ff.
22
Dieter Mersch, "Positive und negative Regeln. Zur Ambivalenz regulierter
Imaginationen," in Archipele des Imaginären, ed. Jörg Huber, Gesa Ziemer, and Simon
Zumsteg, (Zurich: Edition Voldemeer, 2009), 109-123.
23
See Jon McCormack and Mark d’Inverno (eds.), Computers and Creativity (Berlin:
Springer, 2012), preface, on emergence, vii; on analogies with biological evolution, viiif.
See also Schmidhuber, "A Formal Theory of Creativity to Model the Creation of Art," in
Computers and Creativity, ed. Jon McCormack and Mark d’Inverno (Berlin: Springer,
2012), 323-337.
 10

more refined and elaborated methods and without the crude glow of
automatized magic that aims to exhibit sphinxes without secrets as truly
artistic objects.

IV
"Novelty" is hardly a meaningful measure of creativity. Something
new can be empty, building only upon an existing scale of values, or it can
be weak, stemming only from a combination of preexisting elements. Not
even intervals are a sufficient criterium, since they can be a result of spaces,
repetitions or simple permutations. "Novelty" as "novelty" thus says little.
What is needed is the absolute difference of alterity that sparks the "leap" that
we have linked to both reflexivity and a poetics of discovery. The concept of
'alterity' however intersects with theories of negative philosophy and
theology such as 'nonceptuality', 'nonpresentability' or 'indeterminacy' and
also, seen more broadly, with 'catachresis' in the sense of a rhetorical 'non-
figure' or paradoxes as the limits of logical expressibility.24 Emmanuel
Lévinas linked the category of alterity to, in particular, a space "beyond
being," to "transcendence" and the hermeneutic "break." As an example he
cited the experience of "foreignness," the "face" and the "entrance of the
other," which make any possibility of relation impossible and is situated only
in a practical ethics.25 "Novelty" in this case would be associated with a
fundamental otherness whose absolute difference—or différance to speak
with Derrida—refuses in principle to be linked back to what is known,
making any determination or assertion impossible.26
The concept of creativity is closely linked to these ideas. Its
precondition is a radical negation and a radical difference (in the sense of
différance) or alterity. It is the magic of 'nothing', of the 'other than' that
cannot be pinned down and annuls an entire system of concepts, transforming
its perspective. This has not stopped cognitive psychology and the branch of
informatics, which is based on it from making multiple proposals as to how
creativity can nevertheless be described—at the price of either a petitio
principii or a serious error of categorization. Thus Margaret Boden, in her
1990 study The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, not only compiled
myriad examples of the "computer art" that had already been generated at the
time, including works of music, fine art, literature, and design, but she also
made it clear that a 'novelty' was not simply a 'curiosity', but must also fulfil
such criteria as being "unusual" or "surprising," which alone were not

24
See Mersch, Was sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis (Munich: Fink Verlag, 2002).
25
Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).
26
Jacques Derrida, “Différance” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3-27.
 11

sufficient if they were not also "value-laden": "A creative idea must be useful,
illuminating or challenging in some way."27 Decisive for creativity is then
the "sort of surprise" it has to offer—the type of disruption or
transformation.28 Thus "novel" means both a variance of something that was
already there—a development, a supplementary aspect or a change of
function that awakens our interest—as well as an historical or epochal event
that, like a paradigm shift, causes a shock.29 It is a historical caesura in
existing processes or discourses, which "all at once" flips meaning and makes
the "world" seem literally Other.
Tellingly, all of Boden's examples stem from the world of natural
sciences, such as Archimedes' "eureka!" or August Kekulé's benzene ring.30
Once again, the circle closes from the natural sciences to the natural science
explanation of an inexplicable condition of scientific innovations. This
becomes clear in the manifest circularity of the language she uses and in the
characterization of 'novelty' using terms such as 'new', 'different', 'for the first
time', etc. The definiens presupposes the definiendum, and that which must
first be explained is simply repeated. Boden did mark the foundation of this
circularity—"Creativity is seemingly a mystery, for there is something
paradoxical about it, something which makes it difficult to see how it is even
possible"— but her answer to this paradox is founded in the main on linking
the creative act to special types of value judgments that differentiate between
trivial and nontrivial novelty.31 Yet the characteristic "value-laden" is, as she
herself admits, at best a necessary but not sufficient condition. It remains
unclear what is "of value." If attributes such as "unusual," "surprising," or
"interesting" prove to be tautological, it is impossible to mark the difference
between the "unusual" and the jolt or thrust (Stoß) that, as Martin Heidegger
claims in "The Origin of the Work of Art," is part and parcel of the shock of
art: that the "extraordinary [Ungeheuer] is thrust to the surface and the long-
familiar [geheuer] thrust down."32
By now we are looking at a fundamental problem that, going beyond
Boden's reflections, reveals the vital connection between creativity,
evaluation, and subversion. For there can be no creative act without
judgment, just as a supposedly creative object can only be recognized as
creative when it receives recognition as such and gains acceptance over time.

27
Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind. Myths and Mechanisms 2nd ed. (London:
Routledge 2004), 41.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid., 43ff. Boden distinguishes here between P-creativity, which stems from the
individual psyche, and H-creativity, which refers to history.
30
Ibid., 25-6.
31
Ibid. 11.
32
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and
trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
1-56; 40.
 12

Judgment however always occurs post festum and it attains plausibility

through its defense. We will only know what had been "of value" and which
novel event occurred after we have already established what has lost its
novelty. Every work of art is a product of its society and is historically
relative. Art does not take place in a vacuum but is situated within a
framework of societal relations and cultural dialogues that first give meaning
to that which is shown or exhibited. We are dealing with dynamic
interactions, hence it is not enough to simply name attributes and pin down
the creative process on the creation of something never-before-seen, no
matter how radical. More important than any old novelty is that which is new
and shares in the fundamental 'truths' of an epoch. In this way, the function
of art is eminently epistemic: it is only art when it says something about the
world and about us and our times, when it intervenes and reveals what is
missing.33 For that reason, any discussion of art or the theory and practice of
creativity is not complete without a complex description of poiēsis and
technē; every purely technical understanding of the creative process falls
short. It is not enough to indicate the strategies for and forms of making
something "novel"— it is also necessary to discover the specific 'leaps' and
'rifts' (Risse) that make art enter into the vocabulary of its times. At the same
time, judgment is necessary to situate art in the space of history and confirm
its relevance. Judgment however assumes reflexivity. The most important
question to ask about artificial creatio or an imagination that is bound to an
algorithmic rationality, is less whether a creative impulse can be simulated
mathematically, and more whether the production of a creative difference, in
the sense of its calculability, can go hand in hand with the reassessment of its
data and the mathematical modeling of its evaluation as such. I would like in
contrast to posit that the calculation of this calculability cannot itself be
calculable because the former creates the conditions for the latter. The
reflexive ability to judge cannot be part of a mathematical modelling—rather,
it precedes it.
Bense, Nees, Nake, Abraham Moles and others never put their early
computer art to the test of this question. They tried out, constructed and did,
and exhibited those results that passed the test of their subjective judgment,
which in this case became decision-making. In the repertoire of their formal
aesthetics, there was either no plan to generate evaluation or it was left to
subjectivism, despite their abhorrence of the same. While they did model the
creative moment as the product of certain stochastic functions—or group of
measurements—nowhere did there schemata include a proper analysis or
judgment of randomness as "good" or "stimulating," much less
"epistemically promising" or "valuable." We can therefore safely say that
early computer art was a failure. In a 2012 email dialogue between artists and

33
Mersch, Epistemologies of Aesthetics, trans. Laura Radosh (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015).
 13

computer scientists, Frieder Nake admitted as much with admirable

openness: "When in those days, as a young guy using computers for
production of aesthetic objects, I told people ... about this great measuring
business, someone in the audience always reacted by indicating: ‘Young
man, what a hapless attempt to put into numbers a complex phenomenon that
requires a living and experienced human being to judge.’ My reaction then
was, oh yes, I see the difficulties, but that’s exactly what we must do! … I
guess, looking back without anger, they shut up and sat down and thought to
themselves, let him have his stupid idea. Soon enough he will realize how in
vain the attempt is. He did realize, I am afraid to say!” Nake added,
explicating: “I am skeptical about computer evaluations of aesthetics for
many reasons. … Human values are different from instrumental measures.
When we judge, we are always in a fundamental situation of forces
contradicting each other. We should not see this as negative. It is part of the
human condition.”34 To this we should add that the condition of conflict,
contradiction, and disagreement, owing to the condition of radical difference
or alterity, is the conditio of the social. A reflective judgment is based first
and foremost on 'answering'. The answer already includes the indeterminacy
of the 'to what' or the negativity of that which is other. And it cannot be had
without the ethicalness of a 'conversion.'

V
Currently, artificial intelligence research and development sees itself
as creating new possibilities for "cutting edge" art, a "new avant-garde, which
will transform society, our understanding of the world in which we live and
our place in it."35 Consequently, such production of "creativity" believes it
has transcended the aporias of the problem of judgment. While early
computer art was focused only on random processes and their dynamics, the
AI of the present pays homage to the "power" of "big data" and the
"connectionism" of "neural networks," as well as the consequent application
of statistical and structural methods in the context of "supervised" or
"unsupervised" machine learning. Its highest credo is learning, which is seen
to include its own evaluation as the measure of success. The principle
possibility of the mechanization of learning processes was already postulated
in the 1960s by Turing, Wiener, and von Neumann.36 Today however, the
artificial creativity "task force" has completed the qualitative leap—as
members of Google's Magenta project such as Mike Tyka, Ian Goodfellow,
34
Nake in "Evaluation of Creative Aesthetics. A Conversation," in Cormack and d’Inverno
(eds.), Computers and Creativity, 95-113; 102.
35
Arthur I. Miller, The Artist in the Machine The World of AI-Powered Creativity
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 73; 78.
36
George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral. The Origins of the Digital Universe (New York:
Vintage, 2012), 282ff.
 14

and Blaise Agüera y Arcas attest—by enabling the kindling of creative

algorithmics that include judgment. "I’m a computationalist and I believe the
brain is a computer, so obviously a computer can be creative," they say, or
"machines are already creative," and "When we do art with machines I don’t
think there is a very strict boundary between what is human and what is
machine."37
At the same time, there is nothing truly novel about the technical
conditions or mathematical methods used. At most it is the way large amounts
of data are used and the credo of "recognizing patterns." Neural networks are
not fundamentally more powerful than Turing machines and the formal
operativity of computing, despite massive parallel circuits, is not
fundamentally different from von Neumann architecture. Nevertheless the
black box—the gap between input and output, the opacity of the algorithmic
and the mystery of its performance—has become larger, feeding the myth of
the "inspired machine." Rather than focusing on simple sets, the functional
structures used now deal with hidden structures, statistical probabilities,
mutation indices, frequency distribution, gradients, etc.38 Applied to the
production of "art," this certainly makes for some "interesting" or
"surprising" results, but these are isolated occurrences with no feeling for a
global narrative, much less for the irritations and tragedies of human
experience. This is best demonstrated by the "inception" of the neural
network nightmares produced by Alexander Mordvintsev and Mike Tyka's
DeepDream or by Ahmed Elgammal's and Ian Goodfellow's Creative or
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which brought forth such hyped
examples as the portrait of "Edmond Belamy" by Obvious, a group of French
computer scientists. All of the above examples are typically the results of
composites. Belamy for example came from "training" a neural network on
15,000 portraits by artists from the 14th to 20th century compiled in the
WikiArt dataset. The supposedly spectacular result was auctioned by
Christie's in New York for the sum of $432,000.39 (Fig. 2, 3: Obvious:
Portrait of Edmond Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy) The process, which

37
Miller: Artist in the Machine, 66; introduction xxii; xxiii.
38
For an overview see Philipp Galanter, "Computational Aesthetic Evaluation: Past and
Future," in Cormack and d’Inverno (eds.), Computers and Creativity, p. 255-293.
39
Miller, Artist in the Machine, 61ff.; 119ff; https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-
art-failing-grasp-christies-ai-portrait-coup. For more examples see
https://deepdreamgenerator.com/#gallery. On Belamy see
https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-
one-a-machine-9332-1.aspx.
 15

is similar for the creation of images, poems, or musical improvisations by AI,

is based in principle on the compilation of hundreds of thousands of details,
word orders, or compositional fragments within "samples" whose content can

be clearly classified. Integral to this process is thus the prejudices of a

nominalist semiotics. It assumes that artworks consistently obey the dictates
 16

of representational depiction and certain objects, people, faces or animals can

be seen in them, or that poetry is about content that can be stated or that music
is made of easily recognizable sequences of melodies and rhythms. The same
holds true for architectural and other designs as well as screenplays or TV
series: their basis consists of analyzable elements such as idiosyncrasies of
style, typical colors, certain phraseologies, or catalogable figures of
compositions from Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart or modern pop music. The list
alone reveals the flattening power of this process. We are confronted with
elements that can be made discrete and refer to nothing but clichés. The
deadening of the aesthetic process that Theodor W. Adorno ascribed to the
stereotypical character of early 20th century film music holds all the more
true for the "artificial art" of artificial intelligence.40 While its foundation
seems to rest upon human creations, these are no more than a catalogue of
labeled signs, reduced to that which can principally be expressed in numbers
and mathematical functions. Nowhere is it about that which is "artistic" in
"art" but only about the possibility of identification, availability, and
translatability into data, as well as their connection and calculation with the
goal of transforming them into other data.
Inceptionalism, as Alexander Mordvintsev and Mike Tyka initially
dubbed their nominally new and avant-garde style, can be seen as
paradigmatic for such "art." Neural networks always function the same way,
whether they are recognizing things, people, emotions, traffic, or art: a large
number of hidden "layers" are interconnected and provided with a large
amount of statistical and standardized input. Depending on the output, the
evaluation of which is either "supervised" and judged by human beings or
"unsupervised" and assessed by other, similarly constructed, machines,
certain paths are strengthened, analogous to neural pathways in the brain.41
But this machine process is limited to only those elements that can be
transferred mathematically into geometrical symmetries, algebraic
homomorphisms, matrices, etc. and whose patterns therefore can be
recursively transformed into other patterns. This sets specific conditions for
the input. It must be possible, for example, to label data sets to which a
primitive semiotics must be applicable, whether the representation of simple
things or falling or rising tone series or the like—as long as they can be
transferred into discrete numerical values. These are then input into the layer
L1 where patterns are recognized in the numerical data which then become

40
See Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Film (Oxford: Athlone, 1994).
41
For a more in-depth discussion of how neural networks function, see Meredith
Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), 87-119.
 17

the input data for the layer L2 which in turn detects patterns, etc. (Fig. 4:
Inceptionalism). The result is a readable output which, depending on the
representational logic that served as a foundation, statistically confirms or
does not confirm to what is shown, meaning the output can (or cannot) be
assigned to a functional category. Remarkably, when the image of 'object-x'
is input, the output "recognizes" this object at a percentage of y, whereby one
cannot truly speak of 'recognition', but at best of the reproduction of a name.
The principle thus describes a mechanical form of discrimination based on
probability. It is not comprised of "seeing" something—in humans, the
concept of sight always assumes "seeing seeing"42—but of "sensing" discrete
structures or diagrams and assigning to them an approximate value: 96%
person x, 51% y-emotion, 85% painting by z, 68% in the style of k.
Thus while the process is at first merely an artificial intelligence of
identification—in the sense of detecting the 'thing', 'face', 'emotion', or 'art'—
this process can be changed from reproductive to "creative" when, as
Mordvintsev and Tyka have proven, it is stopped in the "middle" and turned
back on itself to, contrary to its initial purpose, repeatedly act upon itself. Its
output is in that case not a percentage of identifiable objects that can or cannot
verify "tags," but rather strange compositions that do in fact fulfil Boden's
minimal criteria for creativity; namely that they are "surprising," or
"unusual." "Mordvintsev’s adventure …," Arthur I Miller contested, "was to
transform completely our conception of what computer were capable of. His
great idea was to let them off the leash, see what happened when they were
given a little freedom,”43 And further: “Mordvintsev’s great idea was to keep
the strength of the connections between the neurons fixed and let the image
change,” until nightmarish figures appeared—uncanny hallucinatory hybrid

42
In philosophy this concept holds from Aristotle to John Locke, Kant, Fichte and Hegel.
To speak of 'computer vision‘ or machines that can ‘see’ or ‘read’ only confuses by
misplaced anthropomorphism.
43
Miller, Artist in the Machine, 59; see also 60ff.
 18

creatures similar to the drawings of schizophrenics (Fig. 5: Inceptionalism).

Mordvintsev and Mike Tyka coined this stylistic presence
“Inceptionalismus”44 in order to address its new beginning. One can of course
celebrate these "works" as a new generation of AI-assisted digital art. Or one
can call them what they are: psychedelic kitsch.
The production of the now famous Portrait of Edmond Belamy, from
La Famille de Belamy (2018) followed, mutatis mutandis, a similar path.
Belamy is a computer-generated painting "signed" by the central component
of its algorithm code and inscribed in a fictive historical series of family
portraits. Created in the style of eighteenth-century paintings, it occupies, as
it were, the future spot in the ancestral portrait gallery (fig. 3). One version
was extracted from eleven possible portraits, all potential variants of the non-
existent "Edmond Belamy" (fig. 4); the painting's ironic title is a homage to
Ian Goodfellow, the pioneer and inventor of generative adversarial networks
(GAN) on which the image generation was based. While journalists have
claimed that the portrait is "aesthetically and conceptionally rich enough to
hold the attention of the art world," the members of the group Obvious, Hugo
Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier, say their concept was
aimed rather at establishing "GANism" as a legitimate art movement.45 They
aimed to make non-human aesthetics acceptable, putting it on the same level
as human aesthetics in line with their motto, "Creativity isn’t just for
humans."46 The production principle is based on two neural networks that

44
Ibid, 66.
45
Tim Schneider and Naomi Rea, "Has Artificial Intelligence Given Us the Next Great Art
Movement? Experts Say Slow Down, the ‘Field Is in Its Infancy’"
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-art-comes-to-market-is-it-worth-the-hype-
1352011. For a critical commentary see also Ahmed Elgammal, "What the Art World Is
Failing to Grasp about Christie’s AI Portrait Coup" https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-
editorial-art-failing-grasp-christies-ai-portrait-coup.
46
Miller, Artist in the Machine, 120. Hugo Caselles-Dupré explicates: “We did some work
with nudes and landscapes, and we also tried feeding the algorithm sets of works by
 19

compete with one another: a "generator" and a "discriminator." Both are fed
with the same stuff, but they have different tasks. While the generator
attempts to create a portrait that fulfills the criteria, the discriminator
determines whether it is "typically human" or should be junked. "Creation"
and "critique" alternate, but the anthropomorphic denotations should not
distract from the fact that the operation at the foundation of both the generator
and the discriminator consists simply of recognizing patterns. It is still no
more than statistics; "judgment" is not based on criteria, but solely on the
basis of supervised machine learning processes, which in turn have their base
in human choice.

VI
The discriminator, however, is not an evaluator—that role is reserved
for those who make the final choice and from many possible results choose
those that seem to be most "interesting." Machine learning neural networks
therefore only seem to integrate the problem of judgment. In fact, not even
"unsupervised" machine learning, in which only machines are involved
following a games theory model, can be said to judge—discriminating is not
the same as judging. Furthermore, during the production process, all
available material fed to the "art machines" stems from artistic traditions.
Thus it is elements of human history that provide the foundation for
determining which characteristic elements can be used to make "new" works.
The machine's source is humankind's art, whose total is expanded using
probability functions so that the machines "learn" to carry into the future what
has already been done in the past. So while the main motor of early digital
art as programmed by Nees, Moles, and Bense used randomizers for
creativity, today's elaborate AI models are essentially founded in processes
of plagiary that do the same thing as their predecessors: simulate
mathematical contingency to arbitrarily increase the amount of aesthetic
works. The main constructive principle is mimicry, except that the core of
the source of creativity and the event of alterity that it needs, as well as the
passible receptivity of human inspiration, is replaced by the simple
mechanism of mathematical variability—whether in the form of statistics, the
use of Markov chains, the modelling of evolutionary mutations or even the
"strange attractors" of chaos theory. They imitate that which should be

famous painters. But we found that portraits provided the best way to illustrate our
point, which is that algorithms are able to emulate creativity.” See
https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-
one-a-machine-9332-1.aspx. It is perhaps also not unimportant to mention that the
portrait of Belamy has been accused of being a work of plagiarism, since the group did
not "create" the code: "Edmond de Belamy portrait has received heavy criticism by the AI-
art community for being derivative and not original. AI artist Robbie Barrat also said that
the code and the dataset used to produce the work is written by him” (Elgammal).
 20

considered "uncalculable." "Neural networks are designed to mimic the

brain,“ Arthur I Miller wrote; accordingly, AI "creativity" manifests as a
form of innovation that mimes creativity.47 It would be a categorical mistake,
in the literal sense, to confuse it with human creativity. Instead it generates
an at best pale imitation or an impulse to believe in (in the sense of Kendall
Walton's concept of make-believe) similarities—just as Turing's imitation
game once led people into the trap of "competing" with a computer.48
Optimization strategies in artificial intelligence research have almost all been
concentrated solely on conceiving of machines as analogies of humans. They
then confront us with seemingly convincing "doppelgängers" that are in fact
nothing other than a repetition of ourselves.
Another method of creating such pseudo-analogies derives from the
theory of complexity (Fig. 6: Casey Reas: Generative Art). Here, non-linear

systems come into play, which exhibit indeterminate and unpredictable or

even uncontrollable outcomes. Every result consists of a non-reproducible
deviation resulting not from random values, but from emergent processes.
They differ from both performances and from Gilles Deleuze’s and Jacques
Derrida’s ‘play’ of repetition and difference, because they indicate
singularities rather than fluctuations and the occurrence of non-calculable
effects. Second-generation concepts of “generative art” exploited such

47
Miller, Artist in the Machine, 60.
48
See Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 50 (1950): 433-460; see
also Donald Davidson, "Turing’s Test," in Problems of Rationality (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2010), 77-86, which makes clear that even those cases in which humans are bested
by the computer say nothing about whether the machine "thinks." On the current state of
research see James H. Moor (ed), The Turing Test. The Elusive Standard of Artificial
Intelligence (Dordrecht: Kluver Academic Publishers, 2003). For a critical discussion see
also Mersch, "Turing-Test oder das ‚Fleisch’ der Maschine," in Körper des Denkens, ed.
Lorenz Engell, Frank Hartmann, and Christiane Voss (Munich: Fink-Verlag 2013) 9-28.
 21

effects by using “evolutionary algorithms” that seem to create images, music-

pieces or structures that proliferate on their own.49 We are thus confronted
with forms that seem to grow and are as symmetrical/non-symmetrical as
natural phenomena even though they derive from rules—as if we were
observing filamentary organisms or accreting bacterial cultures in petri
dishes.50 Here, “art” resembles artificial fauna and flora, an ecosystem
programmed by designers who allow ornaments and crystalline patterns to
unfold synthetically as if they were digital creatures that begin to dance
according to their own inner rhythms. This is all the more true of AIVA, an
AI-supported 'composition machine' that has learned from, primarily, pop
music, using the same method, in order to perpetuate it endlessly.51 They are
conspicuously similar on the visual as well as the acoustic level, in that the
productions compensate for their aesthetic poverty with an ongoing
serialism. “Artificial Art” is first and foremost industry; its results suffer from
the impregnated texture of the market. Hereby It becomes critical to be able
to make distinctions. That which may look like an unforeseeable event or an
indetermination is as formal as the underlying code. Radical indeterminacy,
in contrast, denotes a negative concept outside of every category, while
generative creations derive from statistics. Not revolution is inherent in its
artifacts, but optimization, transcription, and development through mutation,
which can never be anything but perpetuation and variance.
It is for this reason that huge amounts of data are brought into play,
as well as complex neural networks with thousands upon thousands of layers
whose massive numbers are meant to mimic the neural structure of the brain,
which, it is claimed, functions just as "digitally" as computer systems.
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts famously postulated this homology as
early as 1943 in "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous
Activity," leading von Neumann, despite his skepticism, to assume he was
dealing with an empirical fact.52 However in the end, how the human brain

49
See James R. Parker, Sara L. Diamond, Generative Art. Algorithms as Artistic Tool 2019,
Also https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/an-introduction-to-generative-art-what-it-is-
and-how-you-make-it-b0b363b50a70/.
50
See for instance Hao Hua's compilation of generative art on YouTube or Casey Reas’
graphics, whose developments and turbulences are based on coding, not natural
evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtPi0JvmWbs;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DMEHxOLQE;
https://www.pinterest.de/paolon/generative-art/
51
See“Daddy’s Car”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSHZ_b05W7o; „I am AI“:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emidxpkyk6o; or “On the Edge“:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA03iyI3yEA&list=RDgA03iyI3yEA&start_radio=1&t=
4.
52
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in
Nervous Activity” (1943), http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~coquand/AUTOMATA/mcp.pdf;
John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1958), 74ff. Alan Turing disagreed with McCulloch and Pitts: “The nervous system is
certainly not a discrete-state machine. A small error in the information about the size of a
 22

functions is no more than a debatable observation dictated by the scientific

regime of the times, in this case one that supposed an equivalence between
two seemingly binary structures; namely a Turing machine and the "firing"
or "not firing" of synapses between nerve cells. But this approach remains
reductionist; it not only reduces brain activity to the transmission of signals,
ignoring the role of glia cells, the constant dynamic balance between
excitation and inhibition, and even the plasticity of the human brain, but also
individualizes the process of thought and couples it to one privileged organ.53
The fact that people are social creatures who need others to create "meanings"
or that both interpersonal relationships and those between people and
"worlds" are necessary for there to be anything like thoughts that can be
shared—or creative inventions—none of that is mentioned. The lone
principle is a monistic materialism bent on finding superficial relationships
whose simulacra seems sufficient to substitute one world—human reality and
its conditions—with another: the world of formalized automatons. In this
process, the mathematical principle becomes usurpative; not only has it been
subjugating the description of reality since the early modern era, but now it
is also taking on the genesis of every single thought. However, this
occupation brings forth an aporia, as Hillary Putnam has shown in her
exploration of the "brain in a vat" sci-fi thought experiment. An isolated brain
would not be able to judge its own system of reference and thus create
consistent criteria for truth, reality, and meaning.54 Since they are linked
neither to a history or to the outside world, test-tube brains, androids, and
robots would not be able to decide where they are (in a vat or in a body or
somewhere else) or whether or not their ideas about themselves were true or
false. Therefore algorithms are not able to represent more than humanoid
similarities that are unable to either best us or fool us. They are simply
different: the human imagination and the ingenuity of the mind remain
incommensurable in comparison with computational innovation-machines.
The only possible outcome of a comparison of human and computer
is to ascertain that they are incomparable. This can be seen best in the
"artificial art" churned out by computers. Mordvintsev and Tyka's
Inceptionalism, for instance, reiterates existing aesthetic styles by distorting
them, for example randomly mixing various styles. In this their models are
preserved, not only because they use readily accessible photos, paintings, or
musical compositions as their templates, but also because their
morphological experiments are in the end meant for human eyes and ears and

nervous impulse impinging on a neuron, may make a large difference to the size of the
outgoing impulse” Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," 451.
53
For a contrasting view see Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain and
Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York, Hill & Wang, 2010).
54
Hillary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
1981, 1-22.
 23

their preferences. Like slaves, programs fulfil their programmers wish to

regurgitate that which is "pleasing" and generally accessible, that is to say, it
is in line with their taste. That is the reason these works draw from pop
culture. They reproduce that which is well-known. At the same time, the
aesthetics of representation, especially monsters, is celebrated as the return
to paradise. The images of the "Inceptionalists" are trivial and exhibit a clear
preference for bizarre creatures that, like Belamy, profess in vain to be
original. The same can be said of Leon Gaty's Style Transfer, Jun-Yan Zhu's
CycleGANs, or Mario Klingemann's "Transhancements," whose

"neurographical" creatures look like they have jumped out of blurry Francis
Bacon paintings (Fig 7. Mario Klingemann, Cat Man).55

VII
It would be wrong to say that human creativity also only repeats what
went before it, that it does not bring forth but only transforms or, as Nelson

55
Miller, Artist in the Machine, 78ff.; 83ff.; 101ff.; 107ff; 110ff. See also Miler "Can
Machines be more creative than humans?" The Guardian, March 4, 2019:
www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/04/can-machines-be-more-creative-than-
humans.
 24

Goodman said succinctly, "the making is a remaking."56 Certainly, the

imagination too, as Kant also knew, can only imagine that which it has
already perceived. And yet that is only half true. For every design, every
positing, also at the same time articulates something unimaginable,
something foreign or utopian. Inventions are more than just metamorphoses.
They also always include a moment of negativity, something unsubsumable,
at least as regards the inexplicability of the ground of the constructive
principles of the construction in the construction itself. Transgression is an
immanent part of all human transformation, because the transformative act
veils itself in the transformed. Artificial "creativity" in contrast is based in
rules, in statistical probabilities or mathematical contingencies derived in
principle from a network of formal interrelations and paths, no matter how
hidden their ground or rulebook. While the computations may seem like free
associations, in the end, despite the system's black box, they remain
algorithms, even if no formula can be given. In contrast, the 'leap' of the
différance, the difference and deferral, or the "alter" in "iter" as Derrida has
put it, is of another dimension and quality because it necessitates the sudden
appearance of alterity, of the event or a temporally determined and
unrepeatable moment in order to manifest.57
Thus "artificial creativity" can at best be described as the performance
of an appearance (Schein), a looking-like whose superficial visual and
acoustic spectacle proves its inherent poverty. Its telos is masking or the
masquerade, no longer to be recognized as such by its human recipients, so
that artificial intelligence first comes into itself in, to speak with Hegel, a
"deep fake." In the era of "post-truth" and "alternative facts," the morphed
doll face can no longer be distinguished from the "real" one. Examples of this
are found in innumerable manipulated images, computer generated
journalism, the continuations of Johann Sebastian Bach's chorales, preludes
by David Cope's program Emily Howell (EMI) or in the recently announced
performance of Beethoven's "new" tenth symphony, interpolated by an AI
from rare notes found in his estate. The scandal is not the fact of a "faked"
Beethoven, but the desire for the same, the belief in the possibility of his
reincarnation, as if there were no death, no ending, and no discontinuation of
his creative energy. And in fact, online comments are rife with emotion and
unreserved admiration. All that machines can currently produce is an "as-if,"
an illusion that we, on the receiving side, are more than willing to be deceived
by. Here we fall prey to the same systematic error found in the Turing test—
whether passed or failed—which fails to inform us about the difference
between human and artificial intelligence beyond the undecidability between

56
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1978), 6.
57
Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1-24; 7.
 25

different types of representation. Turing's "error" was primarily that he built

too many adjustable premises into the setting of his test; not only the oft-
criticized biased concentration on written and therefore putative semiotic
communication, but also a prejudice towards a logics of decision-making that
uses the same mathematical model for the question of possible "machine"
intelligence as for its answer, as well as for the process by which it is verified.
Thus, the structure of its judgment is circular. Just as Turing's argumentation
runs in circles, so do the many attempts to send people down the wrong track
by asking them to decide for example which prints are computer-generated
and which taken by a photographer, or which novel is the product of an
algorithm and which stems from the hand of a human author. Such tests are
senseless because they are created to systematically fool people, because it is
not the superficial lack of difference that decides between art and non-art, but
rather the singularity of an experience and its historical meaning, which can
only be guaranteed by the mandate of authorship.
Why then have "art from the computer" at all? What is the attraction
of constructed creativity, the will to the machine's triumph? The argument
that, alongside artificial simulation, aspects of "thought" are invoked that
seem most human, amounts to no more than positing that we learn to
understand better through the creation of "artificial equivalents" than through
anachronistic philosophical theories. But that argument holds only if
philosophy has already ceded to the natural and technological sciences. What
speaks against it is the immanent incommensurability of human vs machine
production and creativity. The machine has the irrefutable advantage of
speed, mass production, and the métier of calculation. Therefore the true
argument cannot be anthropological when the constructivity of computations
and robotics is used to understand the nature of the human, but only an
economic argument of acceleration. What is creative about artificial
intelligence is not AI itself, but its ability to generate a lavish abundance of
potential images, writings, and musical composition, because machines
always deal with series, overproduction, and the "more-than." In
milliseconds, its functions can churn out more "works" than human artists,
poets, or composers in a lifetime. For this reason, the milieu of digital art is
not concentration, but excess. That is an exact reversal of how the traditional
arts work, which are interesting not because of their creative style or
mannerism, but for their cultural impact. The "works" by machines produce
no more than uninspired excess, an overproduction of commodities whose
only draw is an insipid fascination in the fact that they were supposedly made
without the help of people. This is a revamping of the myth of the
Acheiropoieta, and contains as little truth today as it did then, because the
site of creativity is not the impenetrable depths of neural networks, but the
design of algorithms and their implementation inside their structures.
 26

VIII
Art however can never be the result of mass fabrication, certainly not
at the speed of algorithmic exorbitances. Rather it points continuously in new
and different ways to the abyss at the center of apparitions, to their precarity
and fragility, confronting us again and again with the unfulfillability of our
existence and the terror of its finiteness. This encounter is only possible
through sustained reflexivity. Art always refers back to us. It is not from
machines for machines, but for people, and neither the décor, the promise of
immersion nor the multiplicity of unheard-of beauties or a never-before-seen
is the source of its striving. Rather art longs to discover the traces of that
which does not appear in appearance, of the labyrinth of nothingness in being.
At the same time, it confronts us with a moment of transcendence. This is the
spiritual foundation of art. Aesthetics does not exhaust itself in
phenomenality—that would lead to the ideology of aestheticism—its
epistemic force is found rather in holding us in a relationship with the
inaccessible, with the borders to the world and to death, while also
challenging us to take a stand—in our lives and in our socio-political
contexts.
The artificial creatures from the computer in contrast never reach

these heights of aesthetics (Fig. 7: Inceptionalism). Certainly, there are artists

who see themselves as engineers—in this case however, software engineers
pose as artists and, instead of thinking aesthetically, exact technical solutions.
Solutions that suffer from naïve concepts of both art and creativity. These are
 27

founded on neither theories of aesthetics nor theories of art history, but solely
on the computer sciences, the neurosciences, and cognitive psychologies.
One could say they operate tautologically in their own disciplinary fields.
"Thinking" appears to be just another kind of computation, "learning"
becomes a behaviorist and cybernetic feedback loop, and "making art," a
game. That goes hand in hand with simplified concepts that either stay at the
level of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic categories, or indulge in
a radically relativist idea of art. In the first case, AI researchers refer to entries
from the lexica of English Utilitarianism or perhaps Kant to underline criteria
such as, in the main, "joy," "pleasure," or other aesthetic feelings. Jon
McCormack and Mark d'Inverno also name "beauty" and "emotional
power."58 These astonishing anachronisms not only regurgitate ideas that
were swept away by the artistic avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth
century, they exhibit a glaring lack of understanding of the manifest
epistemic power of the arts.
In the case of the second group, one finds a vulgarization of the
aesthetics of reception rampant in the 1980s and '90s, according to which art
is first made in the eye of the beholder, or the ear and judgment of the reader
or audience. “Everybody has their own definition of a work of art. If people
find it charged and inspiring then it is,” Richard Lloyd of Christie’s is cited
by Arthur I. Miller as saying.59 Or Mike Tyka, also cited by Miller: “To me,
art is judged by the reactions people have.”60 These naïve statements, whose
explicit subjectivism can hardly be surpassed, are de facto resigned to their
inability to find an adequate concept of art, subsequently pushing for what
Adorno has called the Entkunstung der Kunst or "deaestheticization of art."61
Or, as he says in the opening passage of Aesthetic Theory, "It is self-evident
that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its
relation to the world, not even its right to exist."62 But the gesture of
abstention implies the opposite of Adorno's skeptical adage; rather, with a
somewhat forced democratic verve, it bows down to the taste of the masses.
To understand where this may lead, one need only imagine the natural
sciences took a similar approach. Forced to agree with majorities, they would
give in to the pull of arbitrary theories regardless of their truth-content and
would risk becoming trivial. Every call for general proof or evidence would
be denounced as elitism. But democratization has as little place in the
sciences as voting averages are necessary for claims of validity. Science is
not the arena of political majorities, the only thing that counts are the more
58
Jon McCormark and Mark d’Inverno, Heroic and Collaborative AI for the Arts,
https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/15/Papers/345.pdf.
59
Miller, Artist in the Machine, 121.
60
Mike Tyka cited in ibid., 90.
61
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (New York: Continuum, 1997),
16.
62
Ibid., 1.
 28

convincing methods, the sounder evidence, and the better arguments.

Analogously, debates on the democratization of the arts often lead to an
aesthetics most interested in pleasing the largest number of people—at the
expense of what is actually artistic about art.

It should also be noted that it is no coincidence that the art critics most
likely to take this position are the most market-oriented, and that it is the
representatives of large auction houses or google software engineers who are
most likely to parrot them. Their relativism is neither anti-normative nor
critical of institutions, it is simply geared toward a specific purpose. It
reneges on making a judgment, leaving that up to machines that are, however,
unable to do so. “As should be obvious …, computational aesthetic
evaluation is a very difficult and fundamentally unsolved problem,” Philip
Galanter summarizes in his overview of the field, Computational Aesthetic
Evaluation: Past and Future—and to this day there is no evidence that it will
ever be solved.63 But, any understanding of art that lacks the power of
judgment must remain without history, politics, or aesthetics. Thus, that
which can be realized via machine learning is linked neither to sociality nor
to zeitgeist, but acts as contextless, arelational, and “ab-solut” as
mathematics. No “artificial art” ever struggles with accepting only the “gift”
of materiality, or with the limitation of freedom in compositions, or the
dialectic of feasible forms and unfeasible materials, not to mention the
alienation of an era or the distortions of the social and its environmental
order. The designs they let loose refer to nothing more than the parameters
of their own technical conditions; they contain neither social engagement nor
historical impact, nor do they intervene in their environment: they are what
molds the machines. Art in contrast is constantly intervening; it is its own
kind of thinking, rooted in ambiguity, contradictions, and catachresis.64 Not
only is art, as Arthur Danto suggests, “about something,”65 it is first and
foremost about itself, for there is no art that does not deal with itself, ´with
its own concept, purposes, era, and utopian potential. Always involved with
itself, with its own mediality and praxis, it transgresses and transforms these
to also change itself. Art acts with itself, against itself, and beyond itself to
shift its place, its dispositif, and its conditions. Art is therefore first and
foremost a practice of reflexivity. It is complete in the "critique" of itself, if
we understand critique to mean a delimiting that continually questions place,
potential, purpose, and surrender. By invoking its own end it continually
transcends itself and makes something Other of itself. Art is never static, but
always erratic, volatile, and transcendent. That is why Kazimir Malevich, to

63
Galanter, “Computational Aesthetic Evaluation,” 277-87.
64
Dieter Mersch, "Ästhetisches Denken. Kunst als theoria," in Ästhetische Theorie, ed.
Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, and Sandro Zanetti (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2019), 241-260.
65
Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1981), 79.
 29

name just one example, understood the 'image' of an image as "the icon of
our times"; simultaneously the apex and the end of all iconicity. The empty
form or obliteration, to which he gave the ascetic name "square" robs the
image of all figurality and yet remains an image (Black Square, 1915).66 The
art of the square is in this sense "art about art" which attempt to both finish
and begin an artistic era in equal measure. For a machine, such eccentricity
would be pointless. Its principle of production does not allow for negativity.

Early twentieth century avant-gardism insisted on the indefinability

of art and the arbitrariness of the word. Had it not done so, it could not have
newly ignited the angry protests and conflicting discourses and debates on
what art is, what art can be, and what not. Digital art in contrast is exclusively
ludic; it is most similar to an experimental setting, a l'art pour l'art, or a non-
committal game whose toys are neural networks and their machine learning
programs. But their results elicit only responses such as "exciting" or "never
seen before" as if this said something substantial about art.67 In the
meanwhile, it has a degressive effect. The ever-accelerating slew of
computer-generated images, stories, music, and films that are beginning to
glut the market both devalues art and makes the processes of pop culture
ubiquitous. Alongside the increasing rates of production and repetitions, the
complexity of the results is continually sinking.

The bar has also been lowered for the concept of art, whether or not
it is understood aesthetically. To confuse creativity with novelty restricts the
code. Creativity, and artistic practice, has reflexivity as its terminal. The act
of ingenuity, the sharp-witted intuition of the creative impulse, is founded in
the main in discovery or in undiscovered cognitive inhibitions or hindrances
that must be overcome to make room for other thoughts. What is decisive is
not their novelty, but the act of opening. This however presumes a 'thinking
thinking' that does not end in recursivity, but is always triply terminated as:
thinking the object (what), thinking the act (that), and thinking the mode of
thought (how) or the met'hodos and its medium. The interaction and
triangulation of these three and the constant shifting and mixing of levels
cannot be reconstructed in the algorithmic mode. Where thinking breaks with
its own experience, where it abandons its opacity and cooptation in an
inherent dogma, logic and mathematics are at a loss. What is needed is that
'leap out' that necessitates the audacity of "alternative thinking" and that
cannot be reproduced with the same objects in the same modus and the same
performance of the act. That is why the paradox has such an important place
in the creative moment. It begins where we are at a dead end, where we are

66
See also Gilles Néret, Malewitsch (Cologne: Taschen-Verlag, 2003), 49ff.; and Dieter
Mersch, "Sprung in eine neue Reflexionsebene," Ressource Kreativität. Kunstforum
International, vol. 250. (2017), ed. P. Bianci, 136-149.
67
Miller, Artist in the Machine, 74, passim.
 30

confronted with unsolvability (the insolubiles of Medieval logic), with the

desperation of the je ne sais quoi or where we struggle with the inadequacy
of the usual methods and, simultaneously, are unable to continue to travel
well-trodden paths. Then all that remains is a thinking that hangs in the
balance, in the middle, the tertium datur. "Open Sesame—I want to get out,"
is the first aphorism in Stanisław Jerzy Lec's Unkempt Thoughts.68 The
creative leap seeks an opening, not admission. It searches for the exit, not the
entrance. It cannot be taken with probability functions nor can it be stumbled
upon by chance. It comes always and only in the blink of an eye, in a moment
of improbability, of a rigorous undecidability that overrides all logics of
decision, calculability, and simulation.

-translated by Laura Radosh

68
Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts, trans. Jacek Galazka (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1962), 160. [The German translation begins with this cry—trans.]
 31

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