Leonel Moura is a conceptual artist, pioneering in the application of robotics and artificial intelligence in art. Leonel produced a wide range of robots that paint, generate poetry and play in theatre: ArtSbot, 2003, RAP (Robotic Action Painter), 2006, RUR, 2010 İSU. RAP is displayed as a part of a permanent exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, NY. In 2009 the artist was appointed European Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation by the European Commission.
His books include "The Surrealist Robot" (2019), "Nonhuman Art" (2015), "Poesia Robótica (Robot Poetry)" (2009).
Should we give different definitions to contemporary art produced by humans and by machines? Is the stress on contemporary important for you?
Since art is an evolutionary process in constant transformation its definition is a rather tedious debate. Consider the paradox: as an artist, I want to do something that is not accepted as art. Because, in fact, it is my work that redefines the definition of art and not the opposite. And art is what at each given moment human society is able to accept as art.
Hence, there is no difference between human and machine art because we are the observers. Which does not mean that we shouldn’t recognize that there is a multitude of other observers, natural and now also artificial.
Contemporary art is no longer a viable concept because most of the art done under this label is not contemporary. We must find a new term for the art of today.
Is art necessarily connected with the notion of creativity? If yes, please provide a definition of creativity. If not, then what is the “engine” of art (e. g. you consider art as a spiritual practice or a natural part of life and industrial production as Soviet productivists did etc.)?
Creativity is a natural mechanism that promotes change. It is similar to intelligence and therefore it can be reproduced in machines. Artificial Creativity is complementary to Artificial Intelligence.
Human art is just an application of the natural mechanism of creativity.
To expand the field of human art to machine creativity is a very important step. It is inscribed in an evolutionary line from abstraction, overcoming the figurative, to ready-made, overcoming the manufacture, and now nonhuman art, overcoming the human. It is an important step for two reasons: it takes the human out of the loop and it reveals the beauty and creativity of all the other life forms, including the artificial ones. In this sense, it is a clear manifesto against anthropocentrism and also the kind of humanism that perceives the human as the center of the universe resulting in the devastation of all other lifeforms and the planet.
(Check my Symbiotic Art Manifesto).
Do you see any medium limitations in machine-produced art? In perceiving machine produced art?
No. My robots have been shown all around the world always with evident acceptance and enthusiasm. For the moment most people are fascinated by intelligent and creative machines.
How do you see machine artists’ ethic code if both — humans and machines — could contribute to it? Do you imagine machine artists’ impact on human artists’ in a way like an authorship vs cc, high res vs circulationism etc.)?
Machine artists, even as rudimentary as they still are, have an enormous impact on the artist’s role. Human artists are stopping to produce art objects and, instead, are making machine artists. Making the artists that make the art.
This shift is generating new ways of expression and distribution. For example, where is the art object in an interactive work? Or in the performance of my artbots?
As for ethics, I don’t see any relevant issue related to current intelligent and creative machines. There is only one ethical: you do good or you do bad, and everyone knows what it means. If a robot helps a lifeform is good; if a robot injures a lifeform or another robot is bad.
A different question is to know whether we will be able to implement basic ethics in super-intelligent machines. Personally, I don’t believe it.
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