Art on the Move | Jasia Reichardt

From its inception, Right Click Save has sought to uphold a vision of digital art as a movement for radical inclusivity. Of course, the act of acknowledging creative practices that involve digital technology as “art” requires expanding the field of art itself. Jasia Reichardt has been doing exactly that since the 1960s, when she curated a number of exhibitions at the ICA in London, each of which connected art with another field of activity: from writing to technology, music, play, and design.  

Reichardt’s first exhibition, “Between Poetry and Painting” (1965), was dedicated to concrete poetry, which she regards as the first truly international art movement. It was the philosopher Max Bense (1910-1990), exhibiting as part of the show, who suggested computers as a possible subject for the next. While Reichardt is perhaps best known for curating “Cybernetic Serendipity” in 1968, which focused on the relation of computers to the arts, her follow-up show “Fluorescent Chrysanthemum” was the first exhibition in London, perhaps even in the West, of Japanese art. 

This week sees the launch of a new hybrid exhibition, “Patterns of Flow,” both online on Feral File and at NEORT++ in downtown Tokyo, that celebrates a new generation of Japanese digital artists. Inspired by the pioneering philosopher and artist Hiroshi Kawano (1925-2012), whose own works are on view courtesy of Tama Art University Museum, “Patterns of Flow” situates contemporary generative practices in light of the long history of computer art. A collaboration between Right Click Save and Massage Magazine, we are honored that Jasia Reichardt has written the following foreword for the exhibition, continuing the global conversation she started back in 1968.

In 1967, sitting in a café in Tokyo, Shūzō Takiguchi explained to me the principles underlying the experimental workshop, Jikken Kōbō, whose work had been inspired by his ideas in 1951. “What is important,” he said, “is experiment.” In art, as in science, experiment may not succeed but this doesn’t matter. It may lead to something or may not, but it opens doors. And indeed, the work produced by the group, which included artists, musicians, theater designers, and performers, is the best-known movement of the Japanese avant-garde. Most of the participants in the experimental workshop had no formal education in the field that would have prepared them for the branch of art they became known for. 

Thanks to Jikken Kōbō, we were introduced to the possibilities of who could be an artist and what could be art. 

Today, the ideas that were outside the hub of art have gradually become a part of it. This has come about without any decision or announcement. It happened partly with the availability of new technology, and especially the computer, and the people who could use it. The new art that emerged from it, whether as images, music, or film, became interactive very quickly. And with this, the definition of who could be or is an artist has also changed, as has how art could be treated. 

We couldn’t predict what new art would be like. Who could have anticipated non-fungible tokens with certified contracts, or immersive environments responding to visitors and ending up as decorations on tables in restaurants.

As our various possibilities of creating forms of art become increasingly inventive, so artists will continue to use AI programs to produce them. Today, according to the Computer Arts Society, there is concern about the predictions that AI will produce, validate, and sell its own art without any human involvement. But would this be a problem? We won’t be asked our opinion about such a new development, but one of several questions will confront us. Would we know the difference between human artists’ art and that of AI? 

Today, the experiment that Takiguchi so warmly recommended could have something to do with the acceptance of art that wasn’t made by us, even though we could not judge or understand its purpose. We, at the receiving end, must remember that this was the case with just about every experimental avant-garde art movement at the beginning. Perhaps in this way not so much has changed, because to recognise something as a work of art is not a new problem. 

And here are parallels between the world of science and the world of art: both artists and scientists deal with thingless events that are impossible to examine. Take Schrodinger’s quantum mechanics superimposition with the cat, in the box with a vial of poison, that can be simultaneously alive and dead. This can also apply to manifestations that may or may not be works of art. Recognition of a new work of art could be based on increasingly difficult decisions, and this can take a great deal of time, years, or decades. Since the 1960s, both artists and AI have used code, but human art is based on a life lived which cannot be replicated. 

So far at least AI, despite its knowledge of facts of life and of art’s history, may not be able to produce those qualities of strangeness and familiarity on which all art depends. 

Since the 1960s, human media art has developed. Now it is generative and interactive, a community and a movement, whose ideas grow outside of any convention imagined before blockchain and NFTs. When AI informs us that it is making its own art, and perhaps it has done so already, we will look at it with interest, following Takiguchi’s advice. It is, after all, an experiment. We may not be able to consider its creative manifestations in the same way as human art since its evolution is so entirely different. But, there is, and there will be, significant collaboration, as artists continue to be involved, as they always have been, with whatever technologies and experiments become relevant.