ITUBE: Art and Copy, at the

time of Artificial Neural Networks

Keywords: art, computer science, machine translation

Abstract

Among the issues opened by the contemporary is the issue of recognition. Western Art, has always been concerned with this issue. The problem of representation is addressed here from an etymological and then a computer science perspective. After a brief introduction to Pattern Recognition, the results of an experiment begun in 2013, which saw, and sees, the use of Youtube’s machine translation engine, will be presented.

Téchne

Beginning with the Founding Myths of Western culture, the issue of copying has been treated as taboo in Love and Psyche[1], as image/copy, in Plato’s Myth of the Cave[2], in terms of the Simulacrum with Pygmalion[3] in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Art, has been dealing with the problem since time immemorial.

In the cave, Mixed media on board. Author: Manuel Grillo. Year 2011

The term Art itself comes from the Latin word ars, which in turn translates the Greek word téchne, which for the Greeks had a multiplicity of meanings, much broader than the one currently given to it. It drew in fact a mental as well as a manual ability and could be said of science, navigation, medicine, military tradition and so on. Indeed, the word téchne could be translated as skill implying the practical acquisition of knowledge. For Aristotle it was a fusion of thought and production. When he stated that Art imitates Nature he was not talking about Art understood as imitation but about téchne, that is, human skills in general. As a poietic and therefore productive being, man was imitation of creative Nature. This is why in addition to painting or sculpture, theater and poetry also fall into this category. Indeed, poet and painter are held to be equals as poietic, creators of images.

From symbol to image

If in the archaic period the reading of the world was entrusted to the symbol, with the classical period there was a shift from the sacredness of the cipher to the rationality of the written word, which dissolved theoretical use from practical/functional use and emancipated the sign from its content, and thus the image from its support[4]. The idea of image at first, was not linked to the actual, concrete production of it. What the Greeks meant by image was anything that reproduced nature, not as a naturalistic imitation of reality, but as a copy of the creative process that was proper to every living being. The image is thus yes real, but absent in its materiality. The ìdolon (image) was thus related to the manifestation, the representation of the invisible, therefore its meaning was related to theidea of evocation. There was a symbolic efficacy, dictated by culture itself, that made truth, alétheia[5], dis-veiling.

Visionary, Video made during Luca Valerio’s video editing course. Author: Manuel Grillo. Year 2013

With Plato, however, the concept of image, transmuted from the original “apparition,” invested with religious connotations, “to the appearance” of the purely visible, that is, it shifted from the figure to the concept, from the symbol to reason, from a truth understood as unveiling, to a finite, precise, rationalized truth, an exact correspondence between what is and what is seen. Speaking of the image Plato spoke of “opinion and seeming, but not being.” Art, the téchne, imitates nature which “is not,” since, a banal copy of the world of Ideas[6]. The literacy of the Greek world will lead to the birth of poleis, Hyperuranium, rhetoric to history to philosophy, the dominance of speech. Language, ceases to be a gift, an epiphany, a gift from the gods to become a téchne, a dexterity or skill that could be learned.

From epiphany to copy

With writing, speech, language, from being oral that it was, thus became “visible.” Seeing and using, became the prerequisites of abstraction, of the autonomy of form over content; art now becomes, in the classical era, an abstraction of the value of form as such, separated from the sacred functions it had in the past. The téchne mimetike became autonomous, dissolved from all other spheres, it became pure care of form. This emancipation of form, of the plastic figure from its content, lay at the origin of the birth of the image, the formula from myth to logos[7], can thus also be read as “from ritual to abstract form,” and thus autonomous of the image. Sensible representation was valorized as such, the object, the entity, the image, became absolutized, ofbeing, it will now be, nothing. The image from being a device for evoking the absent, became appreciable only as an expression of the pres-ent, and thus appearance, a simulacrum of reality, there was a shift from content/figure, to form/copy. The term téchne, thus acquired purely human connotations, reason replaced the sacred, and the image, from epiphanic became copy. The téchne put itself at the service of the simulacrum, of appearance, for the attainment of the copy.

The copy/artist stone, 3D printed sculpture and natural element. Author: Manuel Grillo. Year 2020

Apex of this evolutionary line of the concept of art as a two-way copy of reality is now represented by computer science.

Computing as a copy

Synthesis of mathematics, logic and philosophy[9], computer science represents the attempt to reproduce human thought. Even the most sophisticated. TheAnalogy [10]. Ossia il trarre conclusioni su qualcosa in base alle sue somiglianze con qualcos’altro[11]. Non a caso nell’ambito dell’Intelligenza artificiale si parla di riconoscimento automatico di oggetti e loro descrizione, classificazione e raggruppamento (clustering).

Evolutionary self-portraits, genetic algorithm. Author Manuel Grillo Year 2020 Used in a wide variety of problems in both the engineering and scientific areas, automatic recognition or pattern recognition introduces to problems of classification or identification of membership categories, where classes or categories can be either defined by the system designer or by the similarities between patterns

[12]. Tra i diversi ambiti di applicazione, l’analisi del linguaggio è uno dei campi di prova piu’ entusiasmanti, in cui il concetto di copia ritrova il suo valore epistemologico.

ITUBE

This assumption was the starting point for the project presented during the 2014 Thesis[13]. Analizzare i sottotitoli automatici realizzati attraverso il motore di traduzione automatico di Youtube. Segue la tabella con il raffronto delle diverse traduzioni realizzate rispettivamente dai partecipanti “umani” e dall’algoritmo di Youtube, nel corso degli anni 2013, 2018, 2021 [14]

ITUBE, Work presented during graduation session of the Multimedia and Technological Arts Course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 2013. Author: Manuel Grillo.

Results

To the initial inconsistency in the 2013 translation between automatic subtitles and sound, in 2018, an almost two-way correspondence emerges. The act of translating takes on a less creative aspect in this second translation: the algorithm makes fewer mistakes. [15]

Unlike human listener M, who can flawlessly translate audio into written text, the machine, i.e. the Youtube algorithm, looks at the world according to rules that do not correspond at all to the reality it finds itself to process.[16] That’s why he falls into error. Or at least he used to fall into it. Certainly between 2013 and 2018 the algorithm changed [17]. Da allora tuttavia, non ha fatto grandi progressi (traduzione 2021).

Conclusions

If art, reproduces reality, so much the better, its constituent processes[18], artificial intelligence, traces this attempt[19]. Argomenti un tempo ritenuti di dominio delle scienze umanistiche, oggi sono entrati nel dominio delle scienze matematiche. Pensiero, emozione, rappresentazione, creatività, percezione e apprendimento [20]. L’intelligenza artificiale interroga e recupera il senso originario del significato stesso dell’arte. Non semplice riproduzione binaria ma simulazione incarnata dello stesso processo creativo della vita. Come insegna la logica, la verità di un sistema non potrà mai essere trovata al suo interno [21]. Ma forse grazie alla tecnologia questo sarà possibile. Mi spiego. Occorrerà forse attendere che la macchina, una volta educata, guardandoci, con i suoi sensori, dirà: Io ti vedo[22], per capire veramente il senso di questa nostra esistenza?

[1] Love and Psyche. Storyboard of a myth. Miriam Mirolla Electa publisher 2008. [2] Book Plato red necklace [3] The Pygmalion Effect. A brief history of simulacra from Ovid to Hitchcock, Victor I. Stoichita, Il Saggiatore 2006 [4] Pg. 34-36 The Meaning of Art in the Archaic Age in: The Flight of the Albatross. Designing Tomorrow’s Society. Thesis conducted for the Painting Course Accademia Belle Arti di Roma 2011. [5] Page 59-62 Memory truth and poetry Jimenez Art Theory, cited in Thesis 2011 [6] Pg. 67 From myth to logos, from ritual to image Art Theory Jiemenez.

[7] Pg. 62-70 From myth to logos, from ritual to image Jiemenez Art Theory. “In this sense the well-known formula “from myth to logos,” habitually used to explain the appearance of philosophy in Greece, must be expanded: from ritual and myth, to the autonomous abstract form of the image. (…) This is the cultural stage that allows us to speak properly of art.” Quoted in Thesis 2013 [8] For further discussion see the first part of the article [9] Piergiorgio Oddifreddi – Mathematical logic video course https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGgXoh2dUhs&list=PL2F522906640743FD&index=19

[10] Surfaces and essences. Analogy as the Beating Heart of Thinking by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander – We are all always grappling with a swirling mass of sensations: a chaotic surface in which the brain has to disentangle itself and try to locate the essence of what is going on. But how does it do it? Underlying our mental activity is not logical reasoning but a more refined cognitive tool: analogy, or the often unconscious perception of deep similarities between what is happening now and familiar memories or concepts stored who knows where or how in our brains. With a series of examples ranging from the naïve but sometimes ingenious observations of children to the unpredictable progress of science (such as the slow parade of subtle analogies that guided Einstein to a complete understanding of the formula E = mc2), from the pervasive but rarely noticed errors of discourse to the underappreciated enchantment of literary translation, Hofstadter and Sander take their ability to immerse themselves in the intricate complexity of knowledge to the fullest extent. The result is this new vision of analogy as the heart of thought, presented in a work destined, like the now-legendary “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” to leave an important mark on world nonfiction.

[11] For a more detailed discussion, see the book Mirror Neurons.

[12] Start2Impact Data Science Video Course

[13] Thesis 2014 Interface with the World. A research hypothesis.

[14] Artwork presented during the graduation sessions held at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome 2013

[15] On the concept of error in art see Openness, Information and Communication in Opera Aperta, Umberto Eco pg 95-112.

[16] For further study: Gragory Bateson’s The Map Is Not the Territory , Thesis 2014

[17] For an in-depth look at the history of Google’s translation algorithm, see https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Traduttore

[18] On the concept of art as process see: The Flight of the Albatross. Designing the society of tomorrow. Thesis created for the 2011 Academy of Fine Arts Painting Course in Rome.

[19] For further study: Turing and the will to reproduce creative thinking in Lessons in Logic Oddifreddi http://www.piergiorgioodifreddi.it/video-menu/audiovisivi/corso-di-logica-matematica/

[20] For an in-depth discussion of the mathematization of emotions see: Interface with the World, a research hypothesis. Thesis conducted for the Multimedia and Technological Arts Course Fine Arts Academy of Rome 2014. (pp. 12-33)

[21] For an in-depth discussion of incompleteness theory of systems, see Mathematical Logic course http://www.piergiorgioodifreddi.it/video-menu/audiovisivi/corso-di-logica-matematica/

[22] For an in-depth discussion of the concept of cognitivist visual thinking, see Ulric Neisser’s Knowledge and Reality