SURREAL
MACHINE
Known for its distorted perspectives of reality, Surrealism grew to be a prominent cultural movement of the 20th century.
Central to Surrealism is its rearrangement of frameworks of form and knowledge that go beyond the confines of logic. However, when viewed by AI, this re-arrangement almost seems indistinguishable from one that is built on carefully conceptualized symbolism .
Having had no conception of aesthetic form and what it represents, the machine approaches a surreal artwork just the same way as it would any other image.
As the machine learns from the repeating shapes and patterns within a dataset of surreal paintings, it begins to draw on similarities and creates new arrangements that go beyond what was in the dataset.
The re-arrangement enacted in the making of the surreal artwork is taken up again by the AI in its generation of new imagery.
The difference in the process enacted by the machine is that its rearrangement is not one that actively diverges from logic per se but one that deviates from the divergence of logic itself.
The way in which Surrealism departs from traditional aesthetics is then anologous to the way in which AI-Generated Art departs from Surrealism itself.
