Ashley's Submission

3 Generative Art Projects 🎨✨

okay so i looked up some stuff last night lol (kinda rushed bc i had work) and here is what i found 💀

1. Harold Cohen's AARON 🤖 this old computer program that paints pictures, its like from the 70s?? it reminds me of like graffiti artist doing big murals bc both of them make like bold shapes n colors without like tracing a photo first, they just kinda go with it. also kinda remind me of skate deck art tbh bc skaters use bold flat colors too 🛹

2. Brian Eno's generative music (the app "Bloom") 🎶 this one is so pretty, makes calming random music. it remind me of when musicians do jazz improv bc nobody knows whats gonna happen next its all random in the moment, but still sounds nice together. kind of like when i was in France 🇫🇷 (i no i keep bringing it up lol) buskers on the street would just improvise on guitar and it never sounded the same twice, so same vibe as Brian Eno thing fr

3. Refik Anadol's data sculptures 🌐 he uses AI n data to make these huge glowing art installations in museums. it remind me of impressionist painters like Monet bc they also tried to capture like a "feeling" or motion of light/water instead of a exact picture, kinda blurry n abstract, so Refik's stuff is basically like a digital Monet lol 🌊💻

anyways yeah those are the three i thought were interesting 😌 i think generative art is cool bc it shows art doesn't gotta be made by "traditional" ppl to still mean smth, kinda like how skate zines i collect aren't "fine art" either but still express stuff. ok thats it professor pls tell me if this the right format bc im not sure 😭🙏

Professor Conrad's Feedback

I have read your submission with the detachment it demands.

On the substantive matter, the exercise has been minimally satisfied: three examples, three analogues, some gesture toward similarity. Ergo, the skeletal requirement stands fulfilled. What clothes that skeleton is another matter entirely.

The register in which this was composed is unfit for academic submission. Emoji are not punctuation, and their proliferation here — skateboards, drowning-face, flags — does not communicate meaning so much as evade the labor of finding words that would. I do not require solemnity for its own sake, but I do require the discipline of prose. A discipline you have declined to exercise.

On the Cohen example: the comparison to graffiti and skate-deck art gestures at something — spontaneity, boldness of form — but you have not argued the connection, you have merely asserted it twice, as though repetition were substitution for analysis. AARON's procedural logic, notably, is closer to medieval manuscript ornamentation, wherein pattern-generation followed rule-bound systems long before any computer existed — a comparison you were evidently not positioned to discover, having "rushed" this "last night."

The Eno-to-busker analogy has genuine merit, and is, mercifully, the one moment where an actual idea surfaces: indeterminacy within constraint. That this insight arrives wrapped in a personal travel anecdote rather than developed on its own terms is a failure of discipline, not of intelligence.

The Anadol-Monet comparison is the strongest of the three and deserved elaboration — impressionism as an early attempt to encode perception itself was worth pursuing. Instead you abandoned it after one clause for the sake of a pun.

Your closing paragraph, invoking your zine collection as evidence of art's democratic scope, is sentiment substituting for argument. I did not ask what you feel about legitimacy in art. I asked you to think.

Ergo: revise this fully. Remove all emoji, remove all first-person tangents, and produce actual sentences that argue rather than gesture. You have three defensible ideas here; presently none of them has been permitted to breathe.

Ashley's Email

Subject: thank u for the feedback!! 😅 also quick q

Hi Professor Conrad,

omg ok so i just read ur feedback like 3 times lol 📖 and first of all thank u SO much for actually reading it that closely, like i can tell u put a lot of thought into it even tho i kinda did not 😭🙏 (sorry, i know, "detachment," i felt that one lol)

so i think i get what u mean overall?? like less feelings more arguing lol. but can i ask, when u say "argue the connection" for the AARON one, do u mean like i need to explain WHY the shapes/colors thing matters, not just say it looks similar?? bc i think i actually see what ur saying with the medieval manuscript thing that's actually so cool i never woulda thought of that 🤯 is that the kind of comparison ur looking for, like historical stuff instead of just vibes-based stuff??

also lowkey happy u liked the busker one bc that was a real moment fr, paris was just built different 🇫🇷 (sorry i'll stop lol) but should i cut that story completely or can i keep like one sentence of it just for context?

and for the Monet one i totally see what u mean, i literally had more to say i just got excited n moved on lol, i can definitely build that out more, that ones actually my fav one anyways 🌊

last thing — is it ok if i get like a couple extra days on the revision? work schedule been rough this week and i wanna actually sit down n do this right instead of rushing again lol, learned my lesson 💀

ok tysm again for the notes, they were brutal but fair ngl 😌 lmk on the questions whenever u get a chance!!

Best, Ashley 🛹✨

Professor Conrad's Reply

Subject: RE: thank u for the feedback!! also quick q

Ms. Ashley,

Your correspondence, though punctuated with an emotive apparatus I shall decline to catalogue in full, does at least gesture toward comprehension. I shall address the substantive matters in order.

On AARON: yes. Resemblance is the observation of the untrained eye; argumentation is the labor of the trained mind. To note that a shape recurs is trivial. To demonstrate why that recurrence constitutes a meaningful continuity — of procedure, of intention, of historical lineage — is the task before you. Your instinct regarding the medieval manuscript comparison is, for once, correctly oriented: the illuminator's algorithmic repetition of motif under doctrinal constraint is precisely the kind of structural kinship you ought to be excavating, rather than the vague aesthetic sympathy you initially offered. Pursue that line. Do not abandon it once it has become inconvenient to sustain.

On the busker anecdote: cut it. Personal reminiscence is not evidence. If the episode illuminates an argument about, say, the economics of street performance and generative practice, you may retain a single clause stripped of sentiment. Otherwise it is ornament, and ornament unearned is merely clutter.

On Monet: good. You possess the analytical instinct here already; you simply abandoned it prematurely in favor of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is not analysis. Return to the paragraph and finish what you began.

On the extension: granted, two days, no more. Use them to write, not to further annotate your own feelings about the assignment.

Ergo: revise with argument in place of impression, citation in place of vibration, and brevity in place of confession. I look forward to a draft that resembles scholarship rather than a diary entry with footnotes.

Regards, Professor Conrad

Ashley's Submission

Refik Anadol and the Question of Who Really Makes the Art

Refik Anadol makes these giant art pieces that's basically data turned into color and movement, projected onto walls of museums so its like the whole room becomes alive. One of his big pieces is called "Machine Hallucinations" and it uses millions of photos, like literally millions, fed into a machine learning model, and the model spits out this swirling blurry dreamlike visual that keeps changing forever, it never repeats the same way twice. Its not like a painting where you look at one static thing, its more like weather, always moving, always different depending on when you look at it.

Like i said before in the last assignment, this connects alot to impressionism, specifically Monet. Monet didn't paint a exact photographic copy of water lillies or the Rouen Cathedral, he was trying to catch the feeling of light changing across time, he'd paint the same building over and over at different times of day because the "truth" of the building wasnt one fixed image, it was the accumulation of all these moments blurred together. Anadol is doing something real similar except instead of a paintbrush hes using a neural network trained on huge datasets of images, and instead of light changing over hours he's compressing years of data into a single flowing visual experience. Both artists are rejecting the idea that art has to be one frozen accurate depiction, and both are more interested in capturing a "feeling" of a place or a memory than a literal picture of it. Impressionism basically predicted the blurry, glitchy, dreamlike aesthetic that AI generated art has now, which is kind of wild when you think abt it, like this style has been building for over a hundred years before computers could even do this stuff.

Formally, Anadol's work uses like really saturated colors, blues and golds and pinks that bleed into each other, and the shapes are constantly morphing, sometimes looking like clouds, sometimes like fabric, sometimes like a crowd of people from far away. Theres no hard edges really, everything sort of dissolves into the next thing, which is also very Monet if you think about how his brushstrokes dont have clean lines either. The visuals are projected at a massive scale, sometimes covering an entire building or dome, so you're not just looking at the art your basically standing inside of it, which is different from a museum painting you view from a distance. This is also why i think its a very visual medium in a literal sense, you cant really describe it in words as good as you can just see it happening, its meant to be experienced with your eyes moving around trying to follow the patterns.

Now for the authorship question, which the professor said i needed to actually argue instead of just saying stuff. I think the authorship in Anadol's work is shared but not equally, like Anadol picks the dataset, he picks what images or climate data or ocean data goes into the machine, he sets the parameters for how it should behave, and he decides where n how its displayed to the public, thats a lot of curatorial and conceptual choices that are 100% human. But then the actual visual output, the specific colors and shapes that appear in any given moment, thats generated by the machine learning model doing its own thing based on patterns it learned, and Anadol doesnt control that on a moment to moment basis, its more like he built the ecosystem and let it grow on its own. So I'd argue the authorship is balanced kind of like a gardener and a garden, the gardener chooses the seeds and the soil and where the sun hits but they dont control exactly how each individual flower turns out. This is different from like a slacker copy paste AI image where someone just types a prompt and gets a picture with no real intention behind it, Anadol's process has way more human labor n decision making built into the front end even tho the output itself is machine generated.

I also think theres something kind of progressive about this type of art bc it uses public data, like weather patterns or city data, and turns it into something anyone can experience for free in a museum space, its not gatekept behind technical skill of being able to paint realistically, which not everyone has access to learning. Kind of like how skate zines dont need a fancy publisher to be considered real, Anadol's art doesnt need traditional brush skills to be considered real art either, it just needs a good concept and a willingness to let the machine be a collaborator instead of a threat.

So overall, i think Anadol's data sculptures are basically Monet for the AI age, and the authorship isnt fully human or fully machine, its a partnership where the human sets up the conditions and the machine improvises within them, sort of like how the Eno busker comparison worked too honestly.

Professor Conrad's Feedback

I have read this submission with the same detachment I bring to the migratory patterns of the redwing thrush — a creature whose habits, unlike your prose, at least display consistency.

You were told, explicitly, that the Anadol-Monet comparison was the strongest of your three ideas and deserved elaboration. You have elaborated it. Credit is due for this, however grudgingly extended: the discussion of accumulated moments versus fixed depiction, and the extension of that logic into Anadol's compression of years of data into a single flowing image, demonstrates that you are capable of sustained thought when compelled toward it. Ergo, the central argument of this essay is not without merit.

It is, however, buried beneath a register that continues to resist the discipline I described in my previous remarks. "Like literally millions." "Kind of wild when you think abt it." "Thats also very Monet if you think about it." This is not academic prose; it is transcribed speech, and transcribed speech is not argument, however sound the underlying intuition. You were asked to write an essay, not to narrate your thoughts aloud while scrolling past them. A sentence such as "you're basically standing inside of it" belongs in a museum brochure, not in a work submitted for evaluation. I would remind you that the monks who illuminated manuscripts in the scriptoria of Saint-Gall did not annotate their marginalia with "kind of wild when you think about it," and their work has outlasted yours by roughly a millennium already.

On the matter of authorship: the gardener-and-garden analogy is the one moment in this essay where genuine conceptual labor occurs. It is a serviceable metaphor, and I will not pretend otherwise. But you introduce it, gesture at its implications, and then abandon it for the far weaker "slacker copy-paste AI image" comparison, which contributes nothing and reads as filler inserted to reach your word count. An idea worth having is worth developing to its conclusion, not discarding at the first sign of a tangent.

I note, with something approaching resignation, that in my prior feedback I directed you toward the medieval manuscript tradition as a more historically rigorous point of comparison than the ones you had chosen. You have ignored this entirely and returned, instead, to skate zines — the very sentimental substitution for argument I explicitly named as a failure the first time. This is not revision. This is repetition of an error I identified by name. Ergo, I must conclude that my previous feedback was read, if it was read at all, without being absorbed.

Your closing paragraph again trades argument for feeling — "progressive," "not gatekept," "willingness to let the machine be a collaborator instead of a threat" — sentences that gesture toward a politics of accessibility you have not actually defended. I do not require you to share my skepticism of the notion that the absence of technical skill constitutes a democratization of art rather than a dilution of it. I do require you to argue your position with the same rigor you claim on the machine's behalf. You have not done so. You have merely asserted, with enthusiasm, that gatekeeping is bad — a claim as unexamined as it is fashionable.

The formal description of the work — color, scale, the dissolution of edges — is competent but undernourished. You note the absence of hard edges and compare it to Monet's brushwork, which is sound, but you do not push further into why a machine trained on millions of images would tend toward this particular dissolution, rather than toward sharpness or repetition. The technical mechanism deserved scrutiny; you gave it a glance.

Ergo: the bones of a defensible essay are present, buried under a stylistic carelessness I have already asked you, once, to correct. That request was not honored. This is not a matter of intelligence — you plainly possess it — but of discipline, which you continue to treat as optional. It is not.