Duchamp’s time machines: Paul Minott in discussion with James Gillham

Paul Minott worked as a leading graphic designer for over thirty years, working for
numerous international design consultancies in London and abroad. He ran a
successful partnership in London before embarking on a teaching career at Bath Spa University. He now works making one-off abstract prints using an etching press.

James Gillham completed a practice-led Ph.D. in Fine Art at the University of Reading in 2014, researching capability via the intersection of institutional demands and intersubjective expectation. He continues this research by painting the Humpty character from Olaf Stapledon’s Last Men in London, and by seeking similar representations in Science Fiction. James lives and works in Wiltshire, and is the cover artist for the latest issue (299) of Vector.

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23. VIA CREATIVE COMMONS/COURTESY PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

Marcel Duchamp’s famous work The Large Glass (1915-23) has been duplicated numerous times, by artists such as Richard Hamilton (1965) and Ulf Linde (1961). Duchamp’s approval of these pieces emerges from his established interest in the ready-made, but also points to a more nuanced conception of time situated in popular contemporary European Modernist thought.

Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 (1912) is perhaps the most explicit example of this interest with temporality, but the glass mechanisms such as Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1925) bring these engagements into clearer focus. These spinning devices suggest an investigational approach to time’s passage – expansions and contractions operating between objective measurement and subjective experience.

Duchamp’s ludic approach to time has interested artist and printmaker Paul Minott for many years, and is the impulse behind Minott’s latest work: Portrait de Voyage dans le Temps. Portrait de Voyage dans le Temps is an Artificially Generated visual essay, showing Marcel Duchamp alongside his various time machines.

Minott discusses Duchamp’s Modernist conception of time and how this appeared in Duchamp’s artwork – while finding parallels with contemporary use of Artificial Intelligence to generate images – with fellow artist James Gillham.

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AI and art: a few milestones

2023. SF publishers are overwhelmed by AI-generated submissions. Clarkesworld halts pitches.

2022-2023: ‘No AI’: Artists, actors and others organise to resist their work being used without their consent and their livelihoods curtailed by AI.

80.lv/articles/artstation-s-artists-have-united-in-protest-against-ai-generated-images/

2022: The Art of Diplomacy. AI beats many humans at a strategy board game that requires collaboration, subterfuge and verbal negotiations.

www.science.org/content/article/ai-learns-art-diplomacy-game

2022: (Almost) hires a lawyer to defend rights

www.businessinsider.com/suspended-google-engineer-says-sentient-ai-hired-lawyer-2022-6

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Torque Control: Writing Futures

By Jo Lindsay Walton

NightCafe AI’s response to “Sunflowers, Van Gogh”

Klara and The Sunflowers

This issue’s cover was created by an AI. Or … was it?^[1]

Machines have made art for a long time. In the mid 19th century, John Clark’s Eureka machine was dropping perfectly okay Latin hexameter bars on the daily. Harold Cohen’s AARON began scribbling in the 1970s and sketching plants and people in the 1980s.

But with the likes of MidJourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Disco Diffusion, Imagen, and Dream by Wombo, 2022 marks the start of a new era. These AIs accept natural language prompts and produce often startling images. Suddenly the conversation has shifted from what little the AIs can do to what little they can’t do.

The AIs can’t paint complex scenes with many parts, for instance. You’re better off generating the pieces separately and then jiggling them together in Photoshop or GIMP. They can’t paint eyes terribly well, unless your subject happens to be a stoner ghoul. If the moon shines behind your subject’s head, it often bulges strangely, bearing ominous tidings for tonight’s high tide.

Still, the AIs are getting better all the time. Some online art forums are already inundated with spam. There have been instances of AI users setting themselves up as freelance artists, claiming to create the images themselves using traditional methods (Photoshop is now ‘traditional methods’! We are definitely in the future).

Worse still, the rise of AI art has led to the rise of the AI Art Bro. These combat philosophers, who perhaps recently cut their teeth extolling NFTs, love nothing more than to troll freelance artists nervous about next month’s rent.^[2] Yet it would be unfair to write off AI art just because it has some disagreeable advocates. Luckily, as science fiction writers and fans, we’re well-equipped to make more nuanced assessments.

Or … are we?

The uncomfortable fact is that science fiction hasn’t been amazingly good at illuminating the ongoing AI revolution. With notable exceptions, we focus on questions like, ‘Can an AI think? Feel? Love? Dream? What does the way we treat machines tell us about how we treat one another?’ These are enchanting and perhaps important questions. But they tend to overshadow AI as it exists within data science and critical data studies, and the huge role it is already playing in everyday life. So maybe science fiction writers could do more to infuse our work with an appreciation of AI as it actually exists?^[3]

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