Iterated from Memory

In the fall of 1990 Wang Yu Ping, an artist from Zhengzhou, China, painted my portrait. Yu Ping held a state-mandated teaching assignment at Guangxi Teacher’s College in Guilin where I was an exchange student. I don’t remember how we became friends. Perhaps she saw me being bad at basketball or failing to come within a hundred meters of the closest competitor in the 400-meter dash. (The college seemed to enjoy putting foreign students in losing situations.) Somehow it came to be that I spent the afternoon rest periods – between noon and 2:30 PM – eating lunch in her apartment and sitting for my portrait.

Her apartment was a one-room studio with a shared bathroom on the third floor of an oblong box-like dormitory, one of several identical buildings. The bottom half of her cement-walled room was painted green, and the top half was white. (Everyone seemed to employ this half-painted-wall scheme.) This was government housing for young, single teachers who had been assigned to the college. She had a small pleather couch, a glass table, and several thermoses with flower patterns, each containing a silver tube flecked with old tea leaves. Her laundry was hung in the open-air walkway outside the door.

Her portrait of me is not exactly me. Or, rather, it is me but not one that I recognize as emanating from whatever that core is that we call the self. The portrait is really of Yu Ping. Her mind. What she saw on those afternoons when everyone was napping, thirty years ago, in one of the identikit buildings of the outer campus of Guangxi Teacher’s College. Once I made an impression on a person in China. Together we created a version of me that can only be understood as a conversation between my body and her mind.

The portrait is done in a socialist realist style; from the “just below the chin” vantage point where we view heroes of the revolution. My nose is quite prominent in a way that is not true of the undistinguished reality of my nose. My hair, realistically thinning at age twenty, is a golden yellow. Like the fields of golden wheat fetishized in Communist art. My eyes are a piercing blue that does not exist in nature. I am staring resolutely into the middle distance, the unfocused place where leaders gaze, presumably thinking great thoughts. My ears are a bit too large for my face. The portrait is almost a caricature but is resolutely earnest. The work is true. I believe Yu Ping really saw this creature in her apartment.

What makes my portrait authentic is the time and place of its inception within the mind of one human being perceiving another. Walter Benjamin noted that when we use the word authentic, we mean something beyond “genuine.” We mean that the work of art has a kind of “aura” that links it, psychically perhaps spiritually, to a time and a place.

Recently my feeds were awash with portraits of friends who had uploaded their faces to an application which creates avatars by aggregating artistic styles. The app’s math ingests and then spits their faces back at them in their chosen mode. What iterates is not a self-portrait or a portrait of any kind. The avatar reveals the carapace of a persona in a hollow world.

To say that this generated art is disposable is merely to describe it, not pass judgement. To say that it is reflective of an algorithmic aggregation of (human) styles composed by a machine is merely to state the obvious. To the extent that such art has meaning, it is as a shell for the ego. These iterated avatars are the inverse of my portrait. Imagine that instead of sitting for Yu Ping, I sat in an empty apartment in 1990. No artist present. And then I asked a math textbook what it thought of my face.

What is missing in AI pictures? Memory, time, place, the perception of life from the point of view of a body in the world. Communication, inspiration, and the experience of time and space and emotion. As such, the excitement for tech-created cultural objects comes from an anti-human place. Perhaps it feels good —nihilistic, cool — to be anti-human. Clean. Understandable. After all, isn’t all human expression quantifiable when looked at through the lens of “AI”? But to say something is reducible to mathematics is not to say that it fundamentally consists only of mathematics.

There is a need among some to degrade the humanities for reasons unknown. That novel you wrote? The AI just generated ten novels. That painting you made? The AI did the same thing better. AI can paint, write, compose, faster than you in an almost credibly human way, so what’s the worth of your work of art? This argument (or mood or feeling, really) is tied to a moral valuation based on the monetary worth of human products. The person who is adept at fashioning AI prompts makes more money than the person creating artwork. Therefore, becoming good at artwork is a waste of time. Better to hone your prompt-writing skills. At least until, inevitably, those skills are also rendered economically useless.

The reason AI will never create art is that AI is not human. The strength of AI is that it is not human. Perhaps it is someone’s desire to make AI “human”, or it is for some reason important the AI be considered “human.” (As a way of degrading humanity, I guess.) OK, if you went to all the trouble of making a farting, sleeping, belching machine that sometimes didn’t feel like working ‘just because’, and forgot most of the things that ever happened to it, that lived and died a current average of around a half-dozen decades; a machine that barely knew how it was feeling or why it was acting the way it was without the help of a decent mental health counselor and/or pharmaceuticals. Not to mention sex; procreation or lack thereof, disease, plain meanness or plain mercy. Oh, and physicality – the glory of the senses; the experience of living; the unnerving gestalt of the night sky. OK, if you went to the trouble of making a machine like this, well, why didn’t you just ask a real fucking human to paint you a picture in the first place?

Wang Yu Ping’s portrait of me is art. It is not something spit out by a prompt I fed into Bing. My portrait is an extension of human communication. The necessary ingredients were my body, her hands, her talent, our friendship, our memories, our embodied lives together in one room, at a given time. It is, in other words, authentic. Perhaps it is a romantic notion, but I believe that humans value, and will always value (emotionally, not monetarily), the genuine expression of artists’ lives at a given place and time, in human circumstances of history and geography. My portrait is Wang Yu Ping’s and it is also a reflection of Guangxi, China, 1990; the currents of society and history that led us to spend those afternoons together; who I was and who she was; our meeting resulted in this art, this human memory. A captured essence of one moment in one incalculable, if unremarkable, human life.

Next time in Desire Paths: Kurosawa’s Ikiru as zombie AND ghost story. Desire Paths hits your inbox every 2 weeks. Like, share, skeet, trumpet, etc. if so moved!