Art in the Age of Algorithms

The Artist's Existential Dilemma

“Girl With A Pearl Earring” [parody] - by Johannes Vermeer (1665)

For some inexorable amount of time, my girlfriend’s alarm would be that of birdsong. Innocent enough it remained, at first presenting itself as nothing but another unremarkable sound that awoke, let her snooze, and awoke again, the sleeping beauty that drifted in limbo across the fluid border between dream and reality.

After many such weeks of routine limbo, she became so accustomed to the sound of mechanical birds that when real birds, natural-born fluff planes, would begin to squeeze out their first song at the crack of dawn, she would awake— bamboozled by the seminal noise that shook her out of nocturnal merriment. 

Myself, usually punching words into a flat-nosed keyboard while she dozed, noticed one day the softly disturbing, innocuous dystopia that this predicament presented. To confuse an alarm, that of mechanical, manufactured bird squeaks, with the natural sound of real birds seemed to me a microcosm of a shadowy truth in our society.

This confusion which entangles itself in greater complexity every day around the pinky of our technologically enamoured culture, so intoxicated, so in love with our shiny tech,— erases, in quiet desperation, the inherent wisdom of human ingenuity. 

Now listen, I don’t think this forgetfulness is intentional. The semblance of control over our reality is one of mankind’s greatest follies, an idea that keeps us rooted, monkey-minded, to the earth which birthed us, knuckle scraping at the head of Darwin’s evolutionary queue. But let me ask you this,

Does the caterpillar know what it's doing as it begins to spin its cocoon? 

Does it act only on instinct, or does it ponder the inside of its minuscule mind as it begins to itch into pre-natal metamorphosis? 

Can it grasp the importance of the moment as it happens? 

Deep down, I feel that our development into technological all encompassment erases, in slow and aching brushstrokes, like blotting out the Mona Lisa over many years— some long-developed, important part of our human story. It slowly eliminates all traces of the inner power that developed inside of us during the longest constant in human history: our time as hunter-gatherers, and that this human power now cloaks and compresses itself, into the most far-flung of activities. 

An intimate connection with a tribe member condenses into a well-meant emoji whooshed across to a colleague at lunch. A mystical connection with nature moulds into an opportunity for golden hour to bless a selfie that blooms perhaps, into rotten fruits of algorithmic dopamine.