From word to world: is the AI image worth a thousand words?

Hello dear reader. Did you see enough posts of AI art today?

Well...Seems Walter Benjamin is right once again. He knew the innovation cycles we would be going through a hundred years ago. Hans Belting also knew. He affirmed the end of art history, claiming there was no linear history anymore, and new structures would exist, new plural ways to determined the advance of the arts.

If you never read The End of Art History, from Hans Belting, today is the day. This is one of my beloved books from the theory of the arts, because aside from the intimidating title, it is an honest review of how history is impacted by the technologic revolution in the creative sector. Most of the time we fear the changes, and at first we judge their nature, purpose or even true value. Look at the photography case, it was at some point a big tabu and today it is essential part of our daily lives.

I believe majority of us agree photography did no destroy the portrait, but open a whole new world for artists to explore the non realistic or historic landmarks in their art work. The photography released artists from a long term submissive system, where they were instruments for the representation of the winners narrative. Suddenly, artists became free to tell their story - the winner is not important anymore, because is not about the reality but about the perception.

During my college years I studied traditional photography, revelling the film and doing lots of photograms - a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The photograms are not about capturing reality but triggering non existing worlds. The photogram will reveal the composition of objects exposed to the light, and there you can compose surreal experiences and landscapes. Is not without a doubt that Man Rey was creating incredible worlds in his photograms, expressing the believes of the surrealistic movement.

When you look to his composition above you see a world that never existed, composed by 3D objects that when captured by the light are transformed in hybrid shapes that clearly tell a story. The work of art and the magic of light give them a new meaning. So, how can we judge photography as a tool that deviated artists? How can we reduce this incredible enabler of stories into just mirroring reality? Those are the simplistic discourses that stigmatised technology in the arts. So we should not tell them, we should not believe on them. And in 2022, I hope we know better!

So let's agree: a new cycle has started. Benjamin and Belting likely knew the technological revolution is once again revealing new paradings for the arts, and this time - like in the photography debut - the scalability of the artistic creation and the ownership is debated. The Artificial Intelligence generated images are a hype, bringing to artists and non artists the possibility to create images of all kinds. In one side, the discourse of the art is becoming more accessible than ever, not as a niched knowledge but as a valuable element of everyones life. In the the other hand, a lot of creatives may feel the AI is making everyone a potential artist and the true messages, techniques and concepts may get lost. Both of those statements are true. All of this is a valuable discussion. We have have to talk about it, we have to face the elephant in the room again, and again, and again.

The accessibility of a tool generally widen knowledge and enable the popularisation to learn, elevating societies' intellectual level. If you are an artists in fear, you should look into this AI revolution as another opportunity to unleash your ideas, freeing your mind - such as the photography did with the early 20th century artists generation. After all, we are entering the era of the visual words (not virtual worlds), where the storytelling and creative narratives are more powerful than anything else. The saying "an image is worth a thousand words" has never being more relevant, although I would say, in the present days, the word and image carry the similar worth. Behind images there is poetry, there is political discourse, there is storytelling. Maybe we can even rephrase it as " few words are worth thousand images". What do you think?

When we look back to the History of Art we clearly see an inevitable path of transformation, where artists started as specialists of pure representation, passing through the experimentation of surreal worlds triggered by their perception, achieving the conceptual art where the discourse is the center piece. Finally, we arrive into a new phase of technical experimentation in the digital era. And now, we see the "neo-photography revolution", where it is not about the tech it is about the discourse behind it. The image will be generated by the machine, but the artists' vision will exist forever . Isn't fascinating that the same cycle happened a century ago, and we are going through a new period of rebirth where artists discourse will detach from the technology as a constraint? Doesn't matter if you know 3D, 2D, digital paintings or animation...it is not about the tech. It is about the story!

Jeffrey Shaw, an important artists in the digital art history, keep mesmerising me with the Legible City (1989) installation. It always feels relevant and fresh because this art piece is about the world made of words, the discourse above the space, the idea before the technology. And as Plato said: "the virtual starts in the mind". There is nothing more powerful than that first seed composed by words and whispers, that builds the reality we live in.

Using the ground plans of actual cities—Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe—The Legible City completely replaces the existing architecture of these cities with text formations written and compiled by Dirk Groeneveld. Travelling through these cities of words is consequently a journey of reading; choosing the path one takes creates a recombination of these texts, and spontaneous conjunctions of meaning - Jeffrey Shaw

Looking back into humanity lifecycles, we realise storytelling is the factor who united nations and created culture. All we know started as oral knowledge, passed into images and then into words/numbers. Today we see the reverse process happening as a way to rebuilt reality. Numbers, Words, Voice and Image will always be the pillars of the culture construction. Language is the key to build the world and the realities (including the virtual ones, directly dependent on code). And those pillars will take turns in history to reshape what we know. We, as creators/artists, should embrace this wave of transformation as the Fenix. It is time to make our marks!

Now, with the AI coming to the surface, it also feel more accurate than never to embrace the end of art linearity, because the aesthetics of movements will merge and they will all exist at the same time, while poetry emerges creating the unedited rizomatice movements in the art history. In the end, there is no end, but the reinvention of cycles our predecessors saw before us.

I hope not to see artists in fear, but artists in ecstasy experimenting with their words to conceive their worlds.

From a word to a world!

Cheers to that.