There is no difference between computer art and human art

 In December 1964, over a single evening session in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, John Coltrane and his quartet recorded the entirety of A Love Supreme. This jazz album is considered Coltrane’s masterpiece – the culmination of his spiritual awakening – and sold a million copies. What it represents is all too human: a climb out of addiction, a devotional quest, a paean to God.

Five decades later and 50 miles downstate, over 12 hours this April and fuelled by Monster energy drinks in a spare bedroom in Princeton, New Jersey, Ji-Sung Kim wrote an algorithm to teach a computer to teach itself to play jazz. Kim, a 20-year-old Princeton sophomore, was in a rush – he had a quiz the next morning. The resulting neural network project, called deepjazz, trended on GitHub, generated a buzz of excitement and skepticism from the Hacker News commentariat, got 100,000 listens on SoundCloud, and was big in Japan.

This half-century gulf, bracketed by saxophone brass and Python code, has seen a rise in computer-generated music and visual art of all methods and genres. Computer art in the era of big data and deep learning, though, is a reckoning for algorithms, capital-A. We must now embrace – either to wrestle or to caress – computer art.

In industry, there is blunt-force algorithmic tension – ‘Efficiency, capitalism, commerce!’ versus ‘Robots are stealing our jobs!’ But for algorithmic art, the tension is subtler. Only 4 per cent of the work done in the United States economy requires ‘creativity at a median human level’, according to the consulting firm McKinsey and Company. So for computer art – which tries explicitly to zoom into this small piece of that vocational pie – it’s a question not of efficiency or equity, but of trust. Art requires emotional and phrenic investments, with the promised return of a shared slice of the human experience. When we view computer art, the pestering, creepy worry is: who’s on the other end of the line? Is it human? We might, then, worry that it’s not art at all.

Algorithms’ promise holds potent popular allure. A search for the word ‘algorithm’ in the webpages of the empirically minded site FiveThirtyEight (where I’m on staff) returns 516 results, as I write. I’m personally responsible for more than a few of those. In the age of big data, algorithms are meant to treat disease, predict the decisions of the Supreme Court, revolutionise sports and predict the beauty of sunsets. They will also, it’s said, prevent suicide, improve your arugula, predict police misconduct, and tell if a movie will bomb.

The more grandiose would-be applications of algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) are often preceded by ostensibly more manageable proving grounds – games, say. Before IBM’s question-answering computer, Watson, treats cancer, for example, it goes on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! Google’s AlphaGo took on a top human Go champion in a ‘grand challenge’ for AI. But these contests aren’t trivial stepping stones – they can be seen as affronts to humankind. One commentator, realising that Google’s program would win a match, said he ‘felt physically unwell’.

It’s much the same for computer art projects. Kim and his friend Evan Chow, whose code is used in deepjazz, are members of the youngest generation of a long lineage of computer ‘artists’. (These two aren’t exactly starving artists, though. This summer, Kim’s working at Merck, and Chow’s at Uber.) As the three of us sat in a high-backed wooden booth in Cafe Vivian, on the Princeton campus, actual, honest-to-God human jazz played over the speakers – Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s frenetic ‘Pedal Up’ (1973) – and as Kim played me samples generated by deepjazz from his laptop, we were awash in an unholy jazz + jazz = jazz moment.

‘The idea is pretty profound,’ Kim said, as I strained to decipher what was human in the cacophony. ‘You can use an AI to create art. That’s normally a process that we think of as immutably human.’ Kim agreed that deepjazz, and computer art, is often a proving ground, but he saw ends as well as means. ‘I’m not going to use the word “disruptive”,’ he said, then continued: ‘It’s crazy how AI could shape the music industry,’ imagining an app built on tech like deepjazz. ‘You hum a melody and the phone plays back your own custom, AI-generated song.’

Like a profitless startup, the value of many computer-art projects thus far is their perceived promise. The public deepjazz demo is limited, and improvises off just one song, ‘And Then I Knew’ (1995) by the Pat Metheny Group (Kim wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce ‘Metheny’). But the code is public, and it’s been tweaked to noodle the Friends theme song, for example.

Of course it’s not just jazz music, and not just deepjazz, that has gotten the computer treatment – jigs and folk songs, a ‘Genetic Jammer’, polyphonic music, and quite a bit else has been put through the algorithmic ringer.

Visual art, too, has been subjected to algorithms for decades now. Two engineers created this image – probably the first computer nude – at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, somewhere geographically between Coltrane and Kim, in 1966. The piece was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968.

The New York Times reviewed one of the first exhibitions of computer art, in 1965 (just a few months after Coltrane’s recording session) featuring work by two scientists and an IBM #7094 digital computer, at a New York gallery, now long shuttered. ‘So far the means are of greater interest than the end,’ the Times wrote. But the review, by the late Stuart Preston, goes on to strike a surprisingly enthusiastic tone:

No matter what the future holds – and scientists predict a time when almost any kind of painting can be computer-generated – the actual touch of the artist will no longer play any part in the making of a work of art. When that day comes, the artist’s role will consist of mathematically formulating, by arranging an array of points in groups, a desired pattern. From then on, all will be entrusted to the deus ex machina. Freed from the tedium of technique and the mechanics of picture-making, the artist will simply ‘create’.

The machine is just the brush – a human holds it. There are, indeed, examples of computers helping musicians to simply ‘create’.

Emily Howell is a computer program. A 1990s creation of David Cope, now a professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Cruz, ‘she’ was born out of Cope’s frustrating struggle to finish an opera of his own. (Howell’s compositions are performed by human musicians.)

This music is passable. It might even be good and, for me, is safely on the right bank of the uncanny valley. But another thing that makes it more interesting is the simple fact that it I know it was composed by a computer. I’m interested in that as a medium – an amplification of Cope’s artistic expression, rather than a sublimation. But the tension persists.

I’ve fallen down other rabbit holes, too: for one, the work of Manfred Mohr, an early algorithmic art pioneer who is himself a (human) jazz musician, as well as an artist. Namely his painting, P‑706/B (2000), based on a six-dimensional hypercube. I spent the next hour reading about Mohr, the man.

Sometimes in ‘computer music’ it’s also the other way around – humans name the tune, software dances to it. And in one of these cases, the market has spoken loudly. Vocaloids are singing synthesisers, developed by Yamaha, and anthropomorphised by the Japanese company Crypton. One popular Vocaloid, Hatsune Miku (the name translates to ‘the first sound from the future’), headlined a barn-burning North American tour this year, where Miku appeared as a hologram, drawing lines around the block for $75 tickets at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom. Miku is a huge pop star, but not a human. ‘She’ also appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman.

So it’s increasingly not just dorm-room hackers and cloistered academics pecking at computer art to show off their chops or get papers published. Last month, the Google Brain team announced Magenta, a project to use machine learning for exactly the purposes described here, and asked the question: ‘Can we use machine learning to create compelling art and music?’ (The answer is pretty clearly already ‘Yes,’ but there you go.) The project follows in the footsteps of Google’s Deep Dream Generator, which reimagines images in arty, dreamy (or nightmarish) ways, using neural networks.

But the honest-to-God truth, at the end of all of this, is that this whole notion is in some way a put-on: a distinction without a difference. ‘Computer art’ doesn’t really exist in an any more provocative sense than ‘paint art’ or ‘piano art’ does. The algorithmic software was written by a human, after all, using theories thought up by a human, using a computer built by a human, using specs written by a human, using materials gathered by a human, at a company staffed by humans, using tools built by a human, and so on. Computer art is human art – a subset rather than a distinction. It’s safe to release the tension.

A different human commentator, after witnessing the program beat the human champ at Go, felt physically fine and struck a different note: ‘An amazing result for technology. And a compliment to the incredible capabilities of the human brain.’ So it is with computer art. It’s a compliment to the human brain – and a complement to oil paints and saxophone brass.

The machine gaze

 As the boundaries between digital and physical dissolve, can the New Aesthetic help us see things more clearly?

Shoreditch, east London, is home to a remarkable cluster of technology start-ups. Dozens of web and ‘new media’ firms, including Last.fm and TweetDeck, set up shop here and make this grimy but beguiling district their home. No one decided this would happen. It was urban alchemy — the chance intersection of multifarious factors of money, technology, education, culture, time and space, which locked into a temporary virtuous feedback loop, long before the politicians arrived and tried to take credit. Although bathed in broadband glow and old-media hype, what these companies actually do is ancient, primal: they build tools. Within a few blocks are hundreds of people devising new applications for digital technologies — new ways of bringing the electronic global network to bear on life.

It’s in these streets that the boundary between the digital and the physical is at its most porous — in the devices and the minds of a far-seeing local population who are among the first to understand that there might not be a boundary at all. And strange phenomena can arise in this technological crucible. In May 2011, a British writer and technologist called James Bridle set up a blog on the social networking service Tumblr.com to document a few of the phenomena he had seen. Tumblr favours images and snippets of video and text, which is exactly what Bridle posted, a stream of images, screenshots and video, backed up with an occasional quote or sentence of commentary. Among the images posted on the first day were: a photo of the screen of a cathode-ray television at the moment it is switched off; examples of make-up that could be used to defeat face-recognition software; Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan as it appears on Google Maps; and fighter jets with a camouflage of blocky patterns suggestive of pixels.

Join the dots. Find the thread. What links those images? They share a veneer of digital modernity, perhaps, but what else?

Bridle, an expert on digital publishing and a member of the Shoreditch-based design partnership the Really Interesting Group, or RIG, called it a ‘mood board for unknown products’ in a post on the group’s blog. Mood boards are collages made by designers to piece together the visual inspiration behind a project. Here, though, there was no project beyond the collage itself. Bridle called the Tumblr, and the undefined product it represented, the New Aesthetic. And he continued in the same vein, trawling through the crackling, accelerating networked world. Satellite images of server farms, those giant, anonymous sheds where machines crunch out the internet. People dressed in costumes as low-resolution characters from the computer game Minecraft. A label on a pair of jeans bearing nothing more than a line of Excel code, a bug in a clothing factory manifesting at the other end of the supply chain. Oddities from Google Street View — seagulls, prostitutes, security black spots. Scenes from the drone age. Rough-edged, lo-fi objects produced by 3D scanning and 3D printing.

Converging, leapfrogging technologies evoke new emotional responses within us, responses that do not yet have names

The spectral outline of something swims into view: the way machines see. The spread of robot eyes — on phones, on drones, on buildings, on satellites, on Google vehicles, on us. The way machines show us things, and the spread of screens. The rise of augmented reality, the insertion of digital constructs into real landscapes. The way things appear to us when they are mediated, somehow, by digital machines — the data centres, the mechanised production lines and logistics centres, the LCD-bathed outlets. Oddities and idiosyncrasies brought into view by this machine mediation of the stuff around us — the robot inflection, the accent of media devices. Bridle’s one-sentence summary of it all is ‘an eruption of the digital into the physical’.

Intuitively, one feels that this could be important. Smartphones, tablet computers, drones, CCTV cameras, LCD screens, e-readers, GPS, social networking, recognition algorithms and scores of allied technologies and concepts are rising to super-ubiquity around us. They are wreaking untold changes on the behaviour of nation states, corporations and individuals. Yet all this is happening in a cultural environment broadly evacuated of ideology, apart from the exhausted fairytales of neoliberal consumer capitalism. At least the New Aesthetic could be new; really, truly new. Indeed its outer contours suggested frightening, exhilarating novelty, something rare in this paradoxical age of astonishing technology set against jaded and reflexive nostalgia.

At this stage, the New Aesthetic was just those images and a few lines of text — and that feeling, that hunch. Still, it wasn’t just Bridle’s hunch. ‘People responded really strongly,’ he said when I spoke to him a year on from his first blog on the New Aesthetic. ‘But a very small number of people — people I know.’ Those people tended to occupy the same inventive media-technology niche as Bridle — a small community concentrated in east London and on the West Coast of the United States.

Matt Jones, one of the three principals at the celebrated creative studio BERG, which shares premises with RIG in Shoreditch, wrote a long blog entry trying to define the New Aesthetic as ‘sensor vernacular’ and ‘an aesthetic born of the grain of seeing/computation … Of computer-vision, of 3D-printing; of optimised, algorithmic sensor sweeps and compression artefacts’. Warren Ellis, an author who occupies a curious role as intellectual patron for this corner of the London design and technology scene, linked to the post from his well-trafficked website, sending thousands of interested eyes in Bridle’s direction.

This first small flurry of interest encouraged Bridle to persist with the New Aesthetic project, despite its lack of a clear identity, aims or boundaries. But the Tumblr was also an effort at what Bridle calls ‘self-correction’ — refining his terms, adjusting and clarifying a still-inexpressible concept. ‘It’s not a prescriptive thing,’ said Bridle. ‘It’s a gradual collection in order to find the edges of something … Not all the examples definitely belong to it, and that’s OK.’ The New Aesthetic was a Rorschach blot. Its low resolution meant that all observers could project their own meaning into it.

But before Bridle was able to establish what it all really meant, the project was snatched out of his hands.

I met Bridle in Allpress, a coffee shop in Shoreditch (of course), on May 4, 2012. After the interview we walked down Redchurch Street towards Shoreditch High Street. Facing us, a building was under construction, its scaffolding wrapped in mesh. The mesh was decorated by a QR code — the blocky black-and-white patches that, using a recognition algorithm available as a free app, will connect your smartphone to a website. Still fairly novel, this technology is being used with mindless abandon by advertisers and developers. Often the code is useless — because it’s on a poster underground, where phones usually can’t connect to the internet, or because the code has been badly positioned or is split or partially obscured. A blog cataloguing these QR-code foul-ups was linked from the New Aesthetic Tumblr. This code on Shoreditch High Street was only half visible, and thus unusable — but this appeared deliberate. Rather than just being badly applied, the code was being used purely as a decorative device.

Very New Aesthetic. We paused and Bridle took a photo on his phone. Later, the picture went up on the New Aesthetic Tumblr. It was the last post. On 6 May 2012, its first birthday, the account was shut down. What happened?

This March, Bridle chaired a panel on the New Aesthetic at South by Southwest (more commonly, SXSW), a voguish music and technology festival held each year in Austin, Texas. His own presentation on the evolving project was reinforced by presentations by Russell Davies, founder of RIG; Joanne McNeil, the editor of the technological arts website Rhizome; the artist Aaron Straup Cope; and the designer Ben Terrett. The phenomenon was to be set in its proper historical context and differentiated from mere neophilia.

‘Yes, everything has always been new and different, and everything has always been the same,’ Bridle wrote in the summary of his presentation, ‘but we can perform an end-run around this endless back-and-forth …’ The novel ways of seeing suggested by the New Aesthetic promised, ‘if not a new world … then new sensations, which are the medium by which we appreciate a new world.’ Converging, leapfrogging technologies were evoking genuinely new emotional responses within us, responses that do not yet have names. That frisson of wonder when we use Google Street View to scout out a place we haven’t been yet or maybe never will; that shiver at the thought of lethal strikes by unmanned drone aircraft or an end to privacy. The New Aesthetic was setting out to map those reactions. ‘Meaning is emergent in the network, it is the apophatic silence at the heart of everything, that-which-can-be-pointed-to,’ Bridle said in his presentation. ‘And that is what the New Aesthetic, in part, is an attempt to do … to point at these things and go “but what does it mean?” ’

The group took as its logo a pixelated predator drone supported by balloons, ‘a bright cluster … tied to some huge, dark and lethal weight’, as the science fiction author Bruce Sterling put it. He was watching the panel.

Via his Beyond the Beyond blog for Wired magazine and his appearances at conferences and symposia worldwide, Sterling has carved a reputation as one of the most admired thinkers on contemporary technology and society. Because of his status as a high prince in the techno-intelligentsia, he was invited to deliver the closing address at SXSW. He singled out the New Aesthetic for specific mention, and the following month published a 5,000-word essay on it:

The New Aesthetic is one thing among a kind: it’s like early photography for the French Impressionists, or like silent film for the Russian Constructivists, or like abstract-dynamics for Italian Futurists. … we have every reason to take it, and its prospects, seriously. … This is one of those moments when the art world sidles over toward a visual technology and tries to get all metaphysical. This is the attempted imposition on the public of a new way of perceiving reality. … Above all, the New Aesthetic is telling the truth.

Bridle was ‘master of that salon’, wrote Sterling, ‘[He] has never yet claimed to be the André Breton-style Pope of the New Aesthetic, but in practice, nobody ever asks the central questions of anybody else but him. So, Bridle’s the guru there. Fine.’

The first Bridle heard of Sterling’s intervention was when ‘everyone on Twitter started talking about it’. Wired’s own metrics show more than 1,000 tweets directly linking to the piece. From those, scores of conversations started. The New Aesthetic is not the easiest idea to communicate, yet all of a sudden thousands of people were energetically generating opinions on it. ‘Initially,’ Bridle said, ‘I was quite flattered.’

The day Sterling’s essay went live, all the existing literature on the New Aesthetic could be consumed in an afternoon. Within a couple of weeks, blog posts were being generated faster than they could be read. It seemed everyone had something to say about the New Aesthetic.

Naturally enough, there were parodies — a doppelganger blog called the New New Aesthetic, which lasted all of two posts, and a cat-based lampoon called the Mew Aesthetic. And of the more serious responses, not all were positive. A blog called The Creators Project published a series of essays on the subject. One claimed that the New Aesthetic wasn’t new, had very little shock factor and had a ‘disappointingly stuffy’ name. This was tame compared to a contribution from the curator Hrag Vartanian, which stated that not only was the New Aesthetic not new, it wasn’t an aesthetic, it was a style without any meaning, a hopelessly retro throwback to the bits of recent past that were ‘easily Googled’, and blind to broader cultural history. Maybe, Vartanian mused, Bridle had suffered a head injury.

‘Quite quickly,’ Bridle said, ‘I stopped reading anything about it.’

The fundamental problem was that Sterling’s essay had described the New Aesthetic as a movement. The word suggests membership, doctrine, methods and goals. An agenda. And this movement, said Sterling, was moving into its ‘evangelical, podium-pounding phase’. This was death. ‘As soon as you declare something a movement, everyone either wants to be a part of it or wants to destroy it,’ Bridle said. ‘I couldn’t even look at Twitter, because there were people @-ing me, saying “What is this bullshit?” ’

The storm of controversy resembled a denial-of-service attack. ‘It rendered my social networks almost unusable. I couldn’t continue to talk about it because anything I said about it was lost in that mass.’ Two days later, he shut down the Tumblr.

But in a way, Bridle was vindicated: the volume of the response shows he had struck something fundamental — as well as communicable and highly provocative. ‘I would deny it’s a movement because that’s not what I intended it to be,’ he said, ‘but there’s a vacuum for the movement that people think it is. Which is something genuinely of the network. They want the new modernism, and it has to come out of the network.’

Sterling had hinted at this, in a line from his first essay that now feels prophetic: ‘Everybody who attempts [to explain the project] seems to hope and feel that the New Aesthetic must be a private solution to their own personal creative problems.’ Bridle had given a name to a mythical beast that no one has seen directly but, it turns out, lots of people were hunting for: the JPEGwocky.

Looking at some of the mistaken impressions about Bridle’s project — what it isn’t — does help to clarify what it is. As well as not being a movement, it is very much not an art movement, although some artists are creating work that fits into it. Sterling is responsible for this confusion, calling it ‘a typical avant-garde art movement that has arisen within a modern network society’. This set up the New Aesthetic to be denigrated by the art world (which saw it as nothing of the kind) and to be pigeonholed as art by everyone else.

This is unfortunate, not least because Sterling’s essay also furnished us with some helpful terms for what the New Aesthetic actually is. He called it a ‘gaudy, networked heap’, and better than that, a wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities — geodes, two-headed lambs, bits of coral — that were assembled by hungry minds in Enlightenment Europe. The wunderkammer is part of the first act of modern science — astonishment at the oddities of the natural world, which whets the appetite for inquiry. ‘A heap of eye-catching curiosities don’t constitute a compelling world-view,’ Sterling wrote. Perhaps not, but it’s a start.

51 per cent of Americans believe stormy weather can interfere with cloud computing

Another recurring charge was that the New Aesthetic was somehow nostalgic or retro. This originates in the recurring appearance of pixelation and low-resolution graphics as a New Aesthetic motif. A roadside sign resembling a giant Facebook ‘Like’ button, pixels the size of dinner plates, or sculptures composed of hundreds of coloured cubes, looking like something that has stumbled out of a computer game — this kind of thing was a regular feature on the Tumblr. And Bridle also had an eye for less knowing appearances of digital textures, such as in the pattern given to the tail fin of a German jet. This is what happens, he says, when a generation raised on the distinctive, blocky 8-bit graphics of the 1980s grows up and starts addressing the world around it. True enough, but this observation contributes to an impression of the New Aesthetic as being generated by 30-something boy-men hankering for the Super Mario of their lost innocence. Sterling was scornful: ‘Sentimental fluff for modern adults’. Pixelation might rupture the interface between the digital and the physical, but it’s ‘a cute, backward-looking rupture’.

Well, only up to a point. Firstly, this criticism fails to distinguish between the people who make that sort of work and the curators of the New Aesthetic, who are looking for it. Designing a pixelated shop sign while lost in a reverie about Castlevania video game is nostalgic. It is far less nostalgic to ask why people are decorating their world in this way.

In a sense, what the New Aesthetic truly represents is the eruption of a new kind of banality. It is the arrival of digital motifs, glitches and artefacts in the realm of the commonplace and the trivial, the advent of a world where it is thoroughly normal to see a Windows crash screen in place of an advertisement on the Underground, or for trading algorithms to cause a stock market crash. So it’s not truly new — the newness is beside the point. The fascinating thing about the New Aesthetic could be that it was never new — it went from being unknown to being ubiquitous and thoroughly banal with barely a blink. The frisson of shock or wonder one experienced at seeing an aspect of the New Aesthetic out in the wild comes because that is the only time it will be noticed; afterwards it will pass unobserved. The New Aesthetic is not about seeing something new — it is about the new things we are not seeing. It is an effort to truly observe and note emergent digital visual phenomena before they become invisible.

Is, or was? After Bridle shut down the Tumblr, it was hard to see if the New Aesthetic would continue as a phenomena at all. There was a steady stream of blog posts and online discussion, and there are occasional outbursts of activity, such as a ‘sprint book’ on the subject produced by V2, a Rotterdam centre for art and media technology. But without the tick-tock of Tumblr posts, a crucial element of momentum seemed lacking. And then, on 20 August, without fanfare, the Tumblr resumed. Images of the disintegrating holographic ghost of Freddie Mercury from the Olympic closing ceremony; Twitter fatwas by Islamic clerics; an automated car park closed down by a software licensing dispute; the news that 51 per cent of Americans believe stormy weather can interfere with cloud computing. The New Aesthetic was back in business.

This matters because it was a kind of warning. Digital technologies are transforming social, economic and political relations. If these transformations take place invisibly, if they become banal too fast, we are placed in danger. The infrastructure of the internet — its servers, its logistic hubs — are in anonymous sheds, yet we are encouraged to think of this immense deployment of capital, equipment and expertise as a ‘cloud’, an image that has obviously had an influence on 51 per cent of Americans.

Great value is placed on ‘seamlessness’— bigger, better LCD displays that connect better with their surroundings; connections between our bank accounts and mobile phone accounts and loyalty cards; personal devices that talk with each other and compare notes on our data; augmented reality. The virtual world is being integrated with the physical world and this seamlessness is presented as inherently good. No harm may be intended: it’s natural for a designer to want to smooth away the edges and conceal the joins. But in making these connections invisible and silent, the status quo is hard-wired into place, consent is bypassed and alternatives are deleted. This is, if you will, the New Anaesthetic. Instances of the New Aesthetic are often places where a glitch has exposed the underlying structure — the hardware and software. Or it is an oddity that has the unintended side effect of causing us to consider that structure. Part of a plane appearing in Google Maps makes us realise that we are looking at a mosaic of images taken by cameras far above us. We knew that already, right? Maybe we did. But a reminder may still be salutary.

This is political. The New Aesthetic was accused of being apolitical — fascinated by the oddities and wonders being thrown up by drones and surveillance cameras without thinking about the politics behind them. This is plain wrong: politics seeps from nearly every pore of the New Aesthetic. It was often hard to see, but that’s what Bridle wanted to expose.

The question is one of viewpoint. ‘As soon as you get CCTV, drones, satellite views and maps and all that kind of stuff,’ Bridle said, ‘you’re setting up an inherent inequality in how things are seen, and between the position of the viewer and the viewed. There are inherent power relations in that and technology makes them invisible. When you have a man in a watchtower, you look up at him, and that’s an obvious vision of power. When the man is in a bunker far away and you have just a little camera on a stalk … most people seem to be fine with that.’

The New Aesthetic is about seeing, then. And to see and be seen is to engage in those power relations. It might be that the New Aesthetic, as the writers Madeline Ashby and Rahel Aima have both said, is simply men waking up to the sensation of being under surveillance, something women have long experienced in the form of the ‘male gaze’. The riotous spread of new technologies of seeing — not just thousands of new cameras, but also recognition algorithms and other software and hardware that can detect a presence or identify an individual — is subjecting these power relations to constant flux, and the outcomes could be dangerous. The New Aesthetic was the outer froth of this silent social turmoil — the project was to make it legible. ‘By legibility I mean our own ability to read these systems, how much they can affect the way we see and act in the world, and the differing positions of power we have in the world based on how legible those systems are,’ Bridle said. ‘The programmers have a huge amount of agency in the world, because they can deconstruct, reverse engineer and write and construct and create these systems. People who can’t, don’t, and they have less power in the world because of it.’

Observers of the New Aesthetic from outside the worlds of media technology and programming might be tempted to pass off the phenomenon as something only of importance within that world. In doing so, they disenfranchise themselves. Yes, the New Aesthetic is the product of a small, specialised media-technology niche. But it’s a huge mistake to ignore it. The people inside are trying to get a message out.

By brute force

 In their blind variations of senseless combinations, artists and Bitcoin miners both reach for a kind of grace

The first time I went to visit a pair of former artillery sheds on the outskirts of Marfa, Texas, the sun was high in the sky and I knew very little about what I was about to see. The second time, the sun was setting and I knew a bit more, and everything was completely different.

The contents of the sheds are officially known as 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum (1982-1986) by Donald Judd. There are about 60 works in one shed and about 40 in the other. Each one is a box measuring 41 by 51 by 72 inches, and no two boxes are exactly alike. (Bear with me here: I’m about to make one of the most captivating pieces of art I’ve ever seen sound as dry as a tax return.) The boxes have open sides or half-open sides; their sides extend all the way to the corners or are offset by four inches; they are empty or contain internal dividers. The dividers are vertical or horizontal or lateral; they are perpendicular or diagonal; they are single or double; they divide the whole box or half the box; they extend all the way to the corners or are offset by four inches. That’s it; no other variations are allowed. But just as there are, we are told, 221,184 ways to order a Whopper, this still gives an enormous number of possible boxes.

When I first saw them, I assumed that Judd must have begun by generating every single viable permutation and then picked 100 to put on show after the fact. Perhaps, I thought, he chose at random, or had many more than 100 boxes fabricated, editing them down once he’d seen which ones looked best. That’s how I would have done it. It would be far too tedious to design the boxes one by one, because you’d have to remember all the configurations you’d already used in order to avoid repeating yourself: even if you employed some sort of special notation, the task would be maddening enough by the 50th box, let alone the 90th.

But another reason for my assumption might have been the time of day. The even and indirect light of a Texas morning through the sheds’ tall windows gave the boxes a quality that you wouldn’t call inert, but that you could very well call implacable, chilly, unwavering. For all their beauty, it was easy to believe that they had been spat out by some sort of algorithm.

When I went back late the following afternoon, there was nothing cold about them any more. The sunset was doing extraordinary things. Some boxes filled up with bronze, some filled up with shadow. Some turned into mirrors, lenses, fishtanks. For almost an hour, wandering among them, I had the sense of qualities such as solidity, opacity and reflectivity moving back and forth between them like assets between bank accounts. And because I’d spent a few minutes in the gift shop flipping through Marianne Stockebrand’s hefty book Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd (2010), I now knew that Judd did indeed design the boxes one by one, or at least in smallish groups, over a period of several years. There was never a master list.

To the question of how he could grind out 100 different configurations without inadvertently repeating himself or going out of his mind, there are two answers. The first is that, on the evidence of his sketches, he actually did repeat himself a few times, but managed to catch the duplicates before the blueprints were sent off to Lippincott, Inc., a specialist art fabrication company in Connecticut. The second is that Judd was a professional Minimalist (even if he would not have used that term). Variations and iterations were his whole method. Keeping these boxes straight wouldn’t have been as trying for him as it would be for you or me. He loved every one of his children.

My second visit to 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum gave me that rarest of experiences, a genuine epiphany with a work of art. The boxes had bloomed and deepened before my eyes. I went from complete indifference about Judd to real fascination. So why was I so disappointed by what I’d learned?

There is one field in which people routinely do use the approach that Judd didn’t, and that’s cryptography. A ‘brute-force attack’ means guessing a password or encryption key by methodically trying out every possible combination of letters and numbers until you find one that works. Quite a few of Judd’s contemporaries in the art world were experimenting with brute-force attacks of various kinds, but it is probably the Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti whose work best endures prose summary.

For his project Untitled (Victoria Boogie Woogie) (1972), Boetti chose seven different postage stamps that added up to 200 lira, the cost of posting a letter in mainland Italy at the time. He bought 5,040 of each of these stamps and stuck them in all 5,040 possible combinations to 5,040 envelopes addressed to his own house in Turin. Over the next two years, he mailed them from various places, finally exhibiting them in 42 framed groups of 120 postmarked envelopes each. (If my rough calculations are correct, the stamps alone would have cost him about £5,000 in today’s money.)

The first difference between Boetti’s Untitled and Judd’s 100 Untitled Works is that Boetti let his permutations keep running until, like an overstimulated toddler, they had thoroughly exhausted themselves. Having concocted the rules of the exercise, he made no further choices: there was no preemption and no selection. The second difference is that all of Boetti’s envelopes are equal. No ordering of the stamps is any more attractive than any other. From Judd’s 100, on the other hand, certain stars are born. Some boxes look the same at sunset as they do at noon, but others foster optical illusions of various kinds. It could be that Judd was able to predict in advance which configurations would have this property. But it seems more likely to me that the sheer multiplicity of the boxes allowed him to stumble on it by chance.

even people who read the Bible cover to cover in prison don’t trudge through all the begetting

There are at least a few brute-force attacks in other forms of art. We find them, for instance, in the concrete poetry of Brion Gysin, a close friend of William Burroughs. Gysin’s 120-line poem ‘I AM THAT I AM’ (1960) simply cycles through the 120 different orders into which those five words can be scrambled. With the help of an English mathematician called Ian Sommerville, Gysin used an early computer program to generate his permutations. When the poem was broadcast on BBC radio in 1961, it supposedly got the second-lowest audience ratings of any programme to date. What was the point of it? Partly it’s the hypnotic effect on the eye or the ear, but its main appeal is surely that among the gibberish – ‘I I THAT AM AM’, ‘AM I AM THAT I’ – there are a few quasi-meaningful pronouncements – ‘I THAT AM I AM’, ‘AM I I THAT AM’– produced without any human intervention whatsoever (just as a few of Judd’s boxes happen to do clever things with the light, but most don’t).

The single most enduring monument to the brute-force attack in literature is Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (1953). Here, to give an impression of the technique, is the first time it comes up:

Now these voices, sometimes they sang only, and sometimes they cried only, and sometimes they stated only, and sometimes they murmured only, and sometimes they sang and cried, and sometimes they sang and stated, and sometimes they sang and murmured, and sometimes they cried and stated, and sometimes they cried and murmured, and sometimes they stated and murmured, and sometimes they sang and cried and stated, and sometimes they sang and cried and murmured and sometimes they cried and stated and murmured, and sometimes they sang and cried and stated and murmured, all together, at the same time, as now, to mention only these four kinds of voices, for there were others.

The novel contains 36 more passages like that, many of them longer, a few of them up to three or four pages.

Beckett wrote Watt when he was hiding from the Gestapo in the south of France. Obviously, unlike Gysin, he did not have a computer to help him. ‘One imagines that in some situations in the years 1942-44 it took longer to become fatigued or disgusted with such things,’ suggests the American critic Dr John J Mood in a 1971 essay on the novel. ‘One also imagines that all sorts of people had all sorts of little semi-compulsive games with which to occupy themselves at that time. Indeed, in some situations at that time such compulsions were probably necessary if one were to survive with any sanity.’

In other words, because Beckett was bored for three years, readers would be bored for generations to come. That’s how a harsh critic might put it – not me! I quite like Beckett – but there cannot be many who so much as flick their eyes across every line of his three-page combinatorial extravaganzas; even people who read the Bible cover to cover in prison don’t trudge through all the begetting. The sheer weight of them is enough to make the point.

Now, did you notice that something was amiss with the passage from Watt quoted above? Of course you did. This particular brute-force attack should contain 15 permutations but only has 14, and the one it so brazenly omits is ‘sang and stated and murmured’. Dr Mood takes on the heroic task of analysing every single one of these 37 passages and discovers a total of 22 such errors. He argues that all of those errors were deliberate, since the novel is so much about incompetence and faultiness, and for the purposes of this essay I’m going to assume that Dr Mood is correct.

So in one respect Beckett is closer to Judd than he is to Boetti or Gysin, because he meddles with his outcomes. But in another respect he’s closer to Boetti than he is or Gysin or Judd, because his brute-force attacks aren’t intended to generate spectacle or meaning by accident – none of the dozens of permutations in a three-page litany stands out from any other.

In his own essay on Watt in 1992, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote:

The combinatorial is the art or science of exhausting the possible, through inclusive disjunctions. But only the exhausted can exhaust the possible, because he has renounced all need, preference, goal or signification. Only the exhausted is sufficiently disinterested, sufficiently scrupulous. Indeed, he is obliged to replace projects with tables and programs denuded of sense.

Disinterested. Scrupulous. Deleuze seems to be imagining the creator as a sort of ideal bureaucrat or scrivener. This is just right for Boetti, who voluntarily turned himself into a mailroom clerk. In his essay ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967), the American artist Sol LeWitt describes a similar demotion:

When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art… [T]he fewer decisions made in the course of completing the work, the better. This eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective as much as possible.

If Deleuze was right about the aims of Watt, then Beckett, shivering in his farmhouse, beat the New York conceptualists to this idea by 20 years – although it’s also possible that Deleuze, writing in the 1990s, was looking at the ’40s through the lens of the ’60s. Either way, what we seem to be talking about here is liberation from ego. And indeed, the connection with Zen Buddhism is explicit in the music of John Cage, who knew LeWitt and had friends in common with Beckett. Cage, after all, attributed his aleatoric compositional methods to the revelations he’d had at the feet of the Zen teacher D T Suzuki.

We might even extend this circle to include David Foster Wallace. The IRS accountants in his posthumous novel The Pale King (2011) seem very much like the contented, almost angelic bureaucrats that Deleuze evoked and Boetti imitated. ‘Bliss,’ Wallace wrote, ‘a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.’

Why was it so disappointing to learn that Judd’s method did not, in fact, ‘eliminate the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective’? We now have a draft of an answer. The brute-force attack reveals itself as a kind of grace, and any second-guessing becomes a fall from it. If you just let the permutations permute, they envelop you in a wholeness, a blankness, an infinite unselfconsciousness that shatters the moment you try to impose your contingent preferences. Perhaps this was why Beckett couldn’t allow those passages to roll on faultlessly. As Dr Mood observes, everything in his work has cracks.

Let’s go back to the original meaning of the brute-force attack. For some modes of encryption, brute force is no longer effective. Bank transactions, for instance, now tend to use either 128- or 256-bit encryption, which means the key can be expressed as that number of 1s and 0s. According to one estimate, if you tried to use an existing supercomputer to guess a 128-bit key by trial and error, it would take about 150 trillion years. And even if you invented the fastest conceivable supercomputer, the laws of thermodynamics still dictate that, in the words of the American security analyst Bruce Schneier, ‘brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space’.

The same does not apply to the passwords that human beings come up with themselves. If your password isn’t unusually long, any laptop with the right off-the-shelf upgrades could crack it in days or hours. In practice, though, attacks on passwords are not naive brute-force attacks. Because of security breaches at various websites, today’s hackers have access to lists of millions of passwords that real people have used in the past. They combine these with text from dictionaries, Wikipedia and the Bible to give their software a head start, on the basis that ‘123456’, ‘qwerty’ and ‘jesuswept’ are a lot more common than ‘$o61e^60hY’. Like Judd, they decide in advance which permutations are likely to be most effective.

There is, however, one field in which brute-force attacks are still the state of the art, and that’s cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has fallen a long way from its December peak, both in terms of its value and its reputation. But though you might be forgiven for shelving it next to Swatch’s Internet Time in your mental archive of online fads, its volume of transactions remains impressive: Bitcoin moves about $35 million dollars in payments every day. Meanwhile, new cryptocurrencies are being released into the wild on a regular basis, from the robust Mastercoin to the preposterous Coinye to the preposterous and surprisingly robust Dogecoin. Most of these are premised on a similar ‘mining’ idea. Since not a single one of the zillion trend pieces you’ve already read about Bitcoin will have contained a satisfactory account of what this is, there now follows an attempt at an explanation of cryptocurrency mining by someone who doesn’t really understand it either.

there are legions of greedy mathematicians working on the problem as we speak: this might be our era’s equivalent of the quest for a perpetual motion machine

When new ‘coins’ are introduced into circulation, they are allocated to whomever has been helping to maintain the ‘block chain’, the public ledger of every transaction ever made with the currency. Maintaining the block chain involves generating new ‘hashes’, or encrypted records of the transactions. This ought to be easy enough, except that in this case the process is specifically designed to be laborious. It takes a tremendous amount of donkeywork to generate a single valid hash, which is what prevents new coins from being minted too quickly. At the time of writing, the total computing power being devoted to the mining of bitcoins alone is about 350 exaFLOPS (for floating-point operations per second) of, to quote Deleuze again, ‘tables and programs denuded of sense’, or 1,400 times the power of the top 500 supercomputers in the world combined. Mining of this kind is an unadulterated brute-force attack: it involves trying number after number after number after number after number until you find a hash that works.

Bitcoins are still valuable enough that anyone who could discreetly find a shortcut around this process would get very rich. As a result, you can be certain that there are legions of greedy mathematicians working on the problem as we speak. But this might be our era’s equivalent of the quest for a perpetual motion machine. According to the disinterested researchers who have made their findings public, the notion of circumventing the brute-force attack to mine cryptocurrency is nothing but a fantasy. It will never fall from grace.

And it seems to me that the Bitcoin network meets LeWitt’s description of conceptual art. If nothing else, it conforms to his edict that ‘the basic unit’ of the work ‘be deliberately uninteresting so that it may more easily become an intrinsic part of the entire work’. Boetti’s absurdist bureaucrat has been downsized: a computer is capable of accomplishing nothing whatsoever in far less time. ‘Art is noble through being useless,’ wrote the French-born historian of ideas Jacques Barzun, and in the perversity of these easy calculations made deliberately hard we recognise a festival of uselessness. One might object that cryptocurrency mining isn’t useless because, if all goes well, it makes money for the person who does it. But then, so does art.

If you’re a brute-force attacker in the software field, you’re not hoping to stumble across anything interesting on your way to the solution. There will be no ‘I THAT AM I AM’ glittering in the dust. But that’s only because you don’t know which permutations to look for. Any sufficiently large corpus of random data will contain reams of occult knowledge, just like Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel. A Bitcoin mining program will generate the exact time and GPS co-ordinates of your death. A password cracking program will generate a password of the form ‘iloveyou[first name][last name]’, where [first name] [last name] is the husband or wife you haven’t met yet. These things will happen many times every second.

Before his story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), Borges wrote an essay on the same subject called ‘The Total Library’ (1939), in which he explicitly connects the fecundity of randomness to the creation of the universe. He quotes Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods:

I do not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade himself that certain solid and individual bodies are pulled along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of those particles produces this beautiful world that we see. He who considers this possible will also be able to believe that if innumerable characters of gold, each representing one of the 21 letters of the alphabet, were thrown together onto the ground, they might produce the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether chance could possibly create even a single verse to read.

Cicero was wrong, of course. If you asked a computer to throw the letters of the alphabet ‘on the ground’ enough times, it would indeed produce the Annals of Ennius, although it would take even longer than cracking a 256-bit key (and anyway, we wouldn’t know when it had succeeded, because the Annals of Ennius have not survived).

Moreover, most of us now believe that ‘this beautiful world that we see’ really was produced by the fortuitous collision of particles. First of all, matter from the solar nebula had to clump together to create a habitable world. Second, a dribble of that matter had to organise itself into self-replicating molecules. Third, these self-replicating molecules had to mutate into human beings, because we are not books from the Library of Babel, but rather, in the American philosopher Daniel Dennett’s phrase, books from the Library of Mendel. Our current conception of our own origins resembles one of those puzzles where you have to keep shaking and tilting until all the ball bearings roll into the little holes, except that inside every one of those ball bearings is another, smaller puzzle which you have to solve at the same time. The universe took nearly 14 billion years to get all the balls in the holes, and we are very lucky it happened at all. Oh, and on top of all that, Mum and Dad had to meet and perhaps fall in love.

The zen of permutation still holds, but we must also make room for a second reason why the work of Judd, Beckett, Boetti and all their diligent colleagues can be so entrancing. We recognise in the brute-force attack the improbable story of our own birth. The 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum are, therefore, cheats, unless your favoured account of our origins involves a few nudges and whittlings on the Creator’s part. In that case, you might prefer Judd’s method to LeWitt’s total ban on caprice and subjectivity. Either way, the boxes are the product of a small selection of rather mundane ingredients combined in a variety of ways, and from these combinations come wonders that could not possibly have been predicted from the ingredients alone. So we lose ourselves in permutations because we are permutations too. As the sun sets over Marfa, we see our own reflections in the box’s glossy sides and think: ‘I am that – I am.’