Net Art Generator
1999
by Cornelia Sollfrank

According to the start up screen for Cornelia Sollfrank’s Net Art Generator, “a clever artist makes the machine do the work!” The Net Art Generator software evolved from Sollfrank’s Female Extension, her 1997 project which produced 289 different net art pieces by fake female artists. In order to expose her perceived bias for male artists in the Art World, cyberfeminist Sollfrank flooded the Extension competition hosted by Hamburg Art Museum Gallery of Contemporary Art of Hamburg, Germany with fabricated female entries (Tribe and Janna) . To facilitate production of the large number of individual and unique works for each of the bogus entries, she created a complex net art generator by combining four generators commissioned from different computer programmers. She combined their different solutions into one version with all of them available on a start up screen. Each generator culls images and text from existing HTML materials selected from different search engines and randomly combines and reassembles them into collage art (Media Art Net).

While Female Extension deliberately evokes questions about societal favoritism toward males, Net Art Generator begs more subtle questions about art in general. Are machines capable of producing real art? If machines can produce art, is the art as valuable to us as art from humans? Do we value the artist or just the product? Since the original images are appropriated by the art generator who owns the art? Who gets credit for the art work? Does the randomness of the images eliminate any possible meaning or message? Have we reduced “art” to selections of pleasing images or even not so pleasing images? What is art?

Answers to some of my questions may lie in the results of the Extension competition. She didn’t win. Not one of the 289 fake creations she entered placed in the top three. Sollfrank used her loss to three male entries to claim bigotry toward women. I suspect her products were inferior to the winners. I expect the judges were highly qualified to make impersonal, objective evaluations. I expect it was a diverse panel with judges like Feminist Valie Export participating (Tribe and Janna). I suspect they looked for qualities absent in Sollfrank’s work, possibly substance and well-thought-out creativity.

She may have won if she had presented Net Art Generator as her entry. The software she produced may be the real art as opposed to the art produced by it. The software is creative and powerful. Although it leaves questions of authorship open for debate, it is a time saver. The images have depth and interest. I still don’t know if they qualifiy as anything more than commercial art.

For me, fine art should have meaning or evoke emotion. Perhaps less restricted thinkers experience their own emotions out of randomness better than I do. For me, the art generator may be better employed as a “jumping-off” point where the software image could be deliberately manipulated to produce thought and meaning behind the products. As a time saver, I can see using a generator to quickly look for interesting textures and color combinations, backgrounds. As a final museum quality art product I agree with the judges decision: the images fall short of a Gallery competition winner.

References:

Media Art Net. [Internet]. Cornelia Sollfrank, Net Art Generator. Available at http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/net-art-generator/images/7/

Tribe, Mark and Renee Janna, New Media Art. [Internet] Cornelia Sollfrank. Available at https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Cornelia+Sollfrank