Table of Contents "Algorithmic Art & A.I."        Theory Department       IAAA      




Remko Scha:  Course "Algorithmic Art & A.I."

Introduction: Kant, Duchamp, Meta-Art


Kant: Nature versus art

Immanuel Kant’s classic Kritik der Urteilskraft analyses the esthetic experience as a cognitive phenomenon: a feature of perception which is manifested when perception becomes conscious of itself -- when the process of input interpretation does not yield a definite final result, but nevertheless creates a coherent experience.

For today's reader, it is striking that Kant’s discussion is not primarily concerned with works of art, but with natural phenomena -- his paradigm examples evoke flowers, crystals, landscapes, stormy seas and starry skies. This is not a coincidence; it is connected with essential properties of Kant’s theory. In his view, the esthetic experience presupposes a disinterested attitude; it does not involve any practical purposes; it is distinguished from ‘ordinary’, practically oriented perceptual processes in that it is not oriented towards grasping the input under a determinate concept.

Manmade artworks have an inherently problematic status in Kant’s theory. Western highbrow art seems to agree with Kant’s point of view, in that it has become increasingly emphatic about its practical uselessness. But this very uselessness signals a purpose: the artwork is deliberately constructed to be experienced in the esthetic mode, i.e., to be experienced as if it does not have any purpose. The purposefulness of an artwork’s purposelessness must therefore be ignored, if we are to experience the artwork in an esthetic way. Kant accepted this conclusion: "Nature proved beautiful, when it looked at the same time as art; art can only be called beautiful, when we are conscious of its being art, and yet it looks to us as nature."

Perception is an abductive process. To interpret any product of a human artist is to retrace the mental processes behind it. These processes always involve the artist’s ideas, methods, goals and motives. The artists’s fellow-humans cannot be expected to overlook that content, or to deal with it in a disinterested fashion. Manmade art thus constitutes sub-optimal input for the process of esthetic reflection. Twentieth-century art-critics have not failed to notice this implication of Kant’s theory; and some of them have pointed at contingent but ubiquitous features of manmade artworks, which increase their discrepancy with his esthetic ideal.

Lyotard: "Die großen Schauspiele der sich in Unordnung befindlichen Natur sind ein beispiel dafür, daß die menschliche Kunst niemals etwas derartiges hervorbringen kann. Denn alle menschliche Kunst ist immer nur Mimesis und letztlich suspekt, weil immer die möglichkeit besteht, daß sie mit einer absicht konzipiert worden ist und von daher ein Begriff und eine Zweckmäßigkeit mit Zweck auf ihr lastet.

Huge Harry: "Is it possible to listen in a disinterested way to music which is composed and performed by humans? Human composers and musicians are not disinterested. They want money, fame, sex. They cannot hide this, and often they don’t even try. If we do not turn off our microphones when we listen to their pieces, we hear greed, jealousy, lust. Behind the apparent complexity and indefiniteness of their compositions, there are all too clear-cut meanings."

Kant’s own formulations suggest a second-order mimesis: whatever the artwork does or does not portray, it must always fake its "natural" character: ". . . the finality in the product of fine art, although it is intentional, must nevertheless not seem to be intentional."

Esthetically motivated art thus faces a curious challenge: if it is created by humans, it will always be inferior to nature! In the course of the twentieth century, this challenge has been taken up by many artists. Some of them have suggested that they are in fact natural forces, beyond the ken of ordinary humans. Others have tried to withdraw from their artworks, by developing objective art-generating processes which they initiate without controlling the final result. Chance art, écriture automatique, physical experiments, mathematical calculations, biological processes.

Duchamp: The Readymade

Rond 1915 begon Marcel Duchamp af en toe eenvoudige objecten uit de echte wereld te selecteren, die hij dan als kunstwerk tentoonstelde. Een typisch voorbeeld is het hierbij afgebeelde flessenrek uit 1917. Duchamp thus drew a radical consequence from Kant's point of view: that the input doesn't matter, as long as the observer's process of esthetic reflection can take its course.

Clement Greenberg was correct to observe that the whole Duchampian position was essentially anticipated by the eighteenth-century notion of the "aesthetic attitude." Once it was recognized that anything whatsoever could be a work of art if contemplated aesthetically, then presenting such objects as Duchamp's Fountain in the museum merely involved drawing the consequences of this Kantian position, though admittedly with examples which would have bewildered Kant.

(Carrier 1993, p. 26, note 10.)

Duchamp's gesture is sometimes interpreted as a celebration of the sublime autonomous creative power of the artist's Kunstwollen, but his statement "The spectator makes the picture" suggests a different interpretation. Duchamp chose his objects very carefully, but one should not be mistaken about the nature of his judiciousness. He has made quite explicit statements about this, and one can also read it off the objects themselves. They are very ordinary, 'neutral' objects: schoolbook, coat-rack, hat-rack, bicycle-wheel, bottle-rack, snow-shovel, plastic bucket, coffee grinder, typewriter-cover. Standaardobjecten, tekenvoorbeelden uit het schoolboek.

Duchamp: "It is very difficult to choose an object, because after a few weeks you start to like it or to hate it. You must approach a thing with indifference, as if you have no esthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the complete absence of good or bad taste."

Like the chairs and tables which always represent 'the object' in philosophical discussions, Duchamp's readymades are 'free variables', schemas that all other objects can substitute for, lacking specific properties which would block unification. (The relatively many racks and containers among Duchamp’s readymades do support another level of interpretation: evoking their absent
pendants and fillers, they symbolize their own status as "placeholders" in a self-referential way; this is of course not incompatible with equally obvious Freudian readings.)

Duchamp asserts the esthetic interpretation of everything. Esthetic perception is not tied to the art-context — it has its origin and its justification in the observer, and can be applied to arbitrary material.

Faire n’importe quoi

. . . le readymade, c'est n'importe quoi. Ou encore: le readymade est absolument quelconque. C'est mon droit démocratique de juger en profane qui m'autorise à dire que, malgré leur qualités - ou leur absence de qualités - plastiques, le sèche-bouteilles, l'urinoir ou la pelle à neige sont des objets quelconques. Mais, direz-vous, rien ne m'autorise à les juger absolument quelconques. En effet, rien ne m'y autorise. Mais tout m'y oblige. Duchamp ayant anticipé l'auteur du readymade dans la position du regardeur profane qui juge que l'art moderne, au moins depuis le dadaïsme, c'est n'importe quoi, oblige en retour ce regardeur, surtout s'il est "expert", à se projeter rétrospectivement dans la position même de cet auteur et à se soumettre à la même loi que lui. C'est la loi de la modernité et elle ne dit qu'une chose: fais n'importe quoi.

La loi ne fait pas qu'interdire, elle oblige. J'appelle donc moderne l'artiste dont le devoir est (était, fut, a été?) de faire n'importe quoi. C'est un devoir et non un droit. C'est un commendement que l'artiste moderne reçoit et non une autorisation qu'il se donne. Comme tel, ce n'est même pas une loi au sens ordinaire ou juridique. La phrase "fais n'importe quoi" n'énonce pas une règle à laquelle des cas peuvent être soumis, elle prescrit au contraire d'agir sans règle.

De Duve, 1989, pp. 118-119

To embrace the radically subjectivist esthetics of Kant d’après Duchamp, is to loose any reason to make one particular artwork rather than another, or to make any artwork at all. The artist must do "no matter what". De kunstgeschiedenis lijkt dus ten einde te zijn: het kunstwerk verliest zijn bijzondere status, en de kunstgeschiedenis heeft geen drijfveer meer. Wat overblijft is een esthetische manier van leven, waarin de kunst overbodig is geworden.

For a long time, Duchamp seemed to be the only artist taking this stance; an isolated singularity. Dat kwam waarschijnlijk omdat constructivisme, expressionisme en surrealisme zich in deze periode allemaal nog in de start-up-fase bevonden, en hun hooggestemde beloften met veel verve naar voren brachten. Talentvolle kunstenaars hadden teveel interessante uitdagingen dan dat ze wakker zouden liggen van Duchamp's sophismes. Hij werd daarom wel hogelijk gewaardeerd, maar slechts als een soort levende romanfiguur, een vleesgeworden Monsieur Teste. In eerste instantie had Duchamp zelfs nauwelijks epigonen. In de vooroorlogse periode zijn er slechts twee andere kunstenaars die echt Duchamp-achtige werken gemaakt hebben: Morton Schamberg met "God" (een loden pijp op een sokkeltje), en Man Ray met een "mobile" van kleerhangers. (Vergelijk dat bijvoorbeeld met de aantallen kunstenaars die Mondriaan, Malewitsch, Kandinsky of Arp heel letterlijk heben nagedaan!)

La Nausée du Peintre

De dynamiek van de abstracte expressieve kunst raakt in de loop van de vijftiger jaren uitgeput. Het vermogen van kunstenaar en kunstbeschouwer om de sporen van willekeurig welke gebaren als betekenisvol te interpreteren, is nu zodanig overontwikkeld dat elk schilderij zo goed is als elk ander. Dat gaat bij de schilder een misselijk-makende gevoel van zinloosheid opwekken: "La nausée du peintre".
"Ce qui a été ébauché n'apparaît plus que comme une barbouillage inane, sans plus de capacité à signifier que n'importe quelle autre proposition concurrente: émulsion pigmentaire amorphe, désormais collée à la semelle de ce qui n'a plus rien d'un tableau, dont elle était idéalement séparée et qui, désinvestie des rêves d'absolu qui l'habitaient, se trouve maintenant reléguée au rang d'objet parmi les autres. Un désarroi paralysant, une débâcle phénoménologique. On pense au mot qui, à force d'être répété de façon incantatoire – mais là, c'est un jeu, et c'est un jeu d'enfant – se vide de son sens, se remplit d'ouate."
Conil Lacoste 1989, pp. 11/12.

Quotes about "the end of art".

Quotes about "life as art".

Het idee dat de kunstgeschiedenis ten einde is wordt in deze periode bij avant-garde-kunstenaars vrij populair. Sommigen houden ook inderdaad op met kunst maken. Anderen gaan werk maken dat niet meer naïevelijk iets wil uitdrukken, maar dat reageert op de existentiële crisis van de expressie. Zo zien we kunstgenres ontstaan die de alledaagse werkelijkheid omarmen ("readymades"), die de esthetisering van "alles" prediken, die menen dat het leven zelf de ware kunst is, die het "niets" of het toeval celebreren, of die de kunst op een nieuw cerebraal abstractie-niveau willen plaatsen (conceptuele kunst).

Arthur Danto heeft een verhaal over het einde van de kunstgeschiedenis dat tot op zekere hoogte correleert met wat ik hier bespreek. Hij hangt dat verhaal op aan Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, die ik in nevenstaand lijstje niet eens genoemd heb.
Opgave 1:
Zoek op hoe Danto rechtvaardigt dat-ie aan Duchamp voorbijgaat, en leg uit waarom dat niet klopt.
Opgave 2:
De Brillo Boxes zijn d.m.v. silk-screens op houten blokken geschilderd. Bespreek hun relatie met de trompe-l'œil schilderkunst, met de "sculpturen" van Marisol, met de flag-paintings van Jasper Johns, en met de readymades van Marcel Duchamp.

Rond 1960 is de wereld rijp voor Duchamp's standpunt. Alom gaat men nu ongemodificeerde objets trouvés als materiaal gebruiken in schilderijen, constructies en "installaties". En het eenvoudigweg tonen van objecten of situaties, op een manier die sterk aan Duchamp doet denken, speelt een belangrijke rol bij stromingen als Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, Nul, en Pop Art. Bijvoorbeeld: Stanley Brouwn's schoenenwinkels, Piero Manzoni's Magische Sokkels, Arman's Accumulaties, Daniel Spoerri's Tableaux-Pièges, Christo's Empaquetages, Armando's autobanden, en de gevonden voorwerpen van Robert Rauschenberg of Herman de Vries.

Ook worden ideeën die Duchamp's readymades aanstippen in deze periode vaak heel expliciet (in zekere zin dus zelfs on-artistiek) geformuleerd. Talrijke kunstenaars stellen de esthetische interpreteerbaarheid van alles op 'n expliciete manier aan de orde (b.v. met teksten die dit met zoveel woorden zeggen, met handtekeningen op spiegels en glazen ruiten, of met een sokkel waar de hele wereld op staat). 

Of: ze maken, complementair daaraan, de nutteloosheid en overbodigheid van de kunst tot onderwerp van hun werk: tautologieën, paradoxen, monochrome schilderijen, lege lijsten, lege zalen, gesloten galeries.

Note that such artworks do not in fact practise the esthetic interpretation of everything, or the abolishment of art -- rather, they represent the idea of doing that. They are the opposite of a Kantian art: they are statements with a literal meaning, curiously didactic and well-defined. And sterile -- because, once the point has been made, there is no reason to repeat it and no way to develop it. They are self-defeating speech acts which close off the discourse that spawned them.

John Cage: "I am here / , / and there is nothing to say / . / . . ."

Meta-Art

The same art-historical moment, however, also contained a new beginning. Veel kunstenaars die het unieke, statische, expressieve kunstwerk problematisch vinden, gaan de uitdaging aan om nieuwe soorten kunstwerken uit te vinden die nadrukkelijk niet uniek, niet statisch of niet expressief waren. Dat leidt tot kunstwerken op een "meta-niveau", die je kunt zien als voorlopers van de hedendaagse algoritmische kunst.

Meta-kunst. Een klasse van mogelijkheden laten zien in plaats van een individueel ding. Dat kan op verschillende manieren. Zo zien we kunstgenres ontstaan die het toeval celebreren, of die hun kunstwerken op een hoog abstractie-niveau beschrijven en de uitwerking overlaten aan de willekeur van uitvoerende kunstenaars of aan de fantasie van de eindgebruiker ("Open Form", interactivity, concept-kunst).

De kinetische kunst van Jean Tinguely is another case in point. [Zie b.v.: Hultén 1975, pp. 7-8.]
"C'était mauvais, ça faisait 'de la peinture'. (. . .) J'ai fait de la peinture d'une manière désespérée. Je n'arrivais jamais à finir mes tableaux, je pouvais peindre sur une toile pendant des mois sans aucune raison de l'achever, je n'arrivais pas à saisir l'instant, il y avait toujours une espèce de continuité, un infini agaçant . . ."
Jean Tinguely in gesprek met Alain Jouffroy, L'Oeil, N° 135, april 1966.

"Je pouvais continuer sur une peinture (. . .) jusqu'à usure totale de la toile (. . .) Je n'arrivais pas à décider 'Voilà, c'est terminé', à choisir le moment où, disons, (le tableau) est donné à la pétrification. C'est à partir de là, au fond, que le mouvement s'est imposé à moi. Le mouvement me permettait tout simplement d'échapper à cette pétrification, à cette fin. Disons: me permettait de décider: 'Voilà, c'est terminé'."

Jean Tinguely in gesprek met Charles Georg en Rainer Michael Mason, juni 1976.
[In: Conil Lacoste 1989, p. 14. English translation in: Hulten 1987, p. 347. ]

 

Onbepaaldheid en onvoorspelbaarheid

De wens om te ontsnappen aan de voorspelbaarheid van het burgerlijke bestaan was altijd al een van de belangrijkste drijfveren van de romantische kunst. In de twintigste-eeuwse avant-gardes wordt deze wens vaak nogal letterlijk opgevat, en worden er allerlei onvoorspelbare processen op touw gezet – van de simultanéïstische performances in het Cabaret Voltaire tot Écriture Automatique en action painting. Meestal was daarbij, naar goed romantisch gebruik, de hoop gevestigd op de onbewuste mentale processen van de kunstenaar. Rond 1960 is dat niet langer houdbaar. De subjectieve expressie is dan geculmineerd in Jackson Pollock's gratuite gebaren, en veel kunstenaars ervaren de noodzaak om een frisse start te maken. (Pollock's werk was al een onbedoelde pastiche op het werk van surréalisten als André Masson. De pastiche wordt vervolgens op de spits gedreven door de uitvergrotingen van Franz Kline, de theater-performances van Georges Mathieu, en de toenemende populariteit van apen-kunst.) Er ontstaat nu voor het eerst belangstelling voor objectieve onvoorspelbaarheid als artistieke methode: kunstenaars gaan "meta-kunstwerken" maken die een onafzienbaar grote klasse van mogelijke realisaties toelaten, en laten aan het toeval over welke realisaties het publiek daadwerkelijk te zien krijgt. Binnen deze benadering bestaan verschillende genres:

[Cf.: George Brecht: Chance-Imagery, New York: Something Else Press, 1957. (Zie Readers 1985, 1992.)]

De meeste van deze genres zijn niet algoritmisch van aard, maar worden gekenmerkt door het gebruik van een specifiek soort pre-computationele hardware, of door een bepaalde rolverdeling tussen menselijke personen. De onvoorspelbaarheid van dit soort werk is natuurlijk maar betrekkelijk: meestal legt de kunstenaar een dwingend raamwerk vast, dat volledig domineert over de details die door uitvoerder, beschouwer of random sampling bepaald worden.

Chance Art

Maar het meest vruchtbare nieuwe startpunt wordt gevormd door het idee dat alles interessant is. Want niemand beseft echt wat alles is. The esthetic interpretation of everything can be more than the esthetic interpretation of all we happen to encounter in the world as it is; it should include everything imagineable, all possible images. Om alles te laten zien is dus een artistieke agenda die zeker de moeite waard is. Maar hoe doe je dat? Het idee roept twee moeilijke vragen op. Een philosophische: hoe definieer je "alles"? En een praktisch/technische: hoe laat je dat dan zien?

One way to turn the "esthetics of everything" into concrete artworks, is to devise mathematical or computational systems for generating artworks which are not determined by the artist -- arbitrary artworks, random samples from a large space of possibilities. This literal-minded approach to the idea of faire n’importe quoi is known as chance art -- a genre that was widely practised in the sixties. (Cf. George Brecht, John Cage, Elsworth Kelly, François Morellet, Frieder Nake, Peter Struycken, Zdenek Sykora, Herman de Vries.) In the list above we mentioned this approach as "Mathematical Arbitrariness: Chance."

The idea of mathematical randomness addresses Kant's problem in a very direct way. If the esthetic insufficiency of human art is caused by the unesthetic, practical considerations which determine people's subjective decisions, then we can try to avoid that problem by making random artworks, which have not been subjectively constructed or chosen by a human person.

Is it possible to define the set of all possible art objects? Not in a very general way. But once we have specified a particular medium sufficiently explicitly, we have in fact specified a particular set of possible pieces. This is especially clear when we employ a digital medium. In this case, there is a mathematical enumeration of the set of possible outputs. Look, for instance, at a black-and-white screen with a particular resolution, say m x n pixels; the set of all possible images is then defined as the set generated by all combinations of choices of black vs. white for every pixel.

More about "Enumeration Art"
A computer program that in principle generates all these possible images one by one, can be constructed rather easily on the basis of this idea. Lars Eijssen and Boele Klopman have actually done this, for a grid of 171 x 171 pixels. For this program to run through all its possible outputs would take longer than the estimated lifetime of the universe; but an ingeneous interface makes it possible to "scroll ahead" very effectively.

The method of chance art is to draw random samples from the set of possibilities, rather than enumerating it. In this way one quickly gets an impression of the range of possible outcomes. To sample from the set of black & white pixel grids, for instance, one makes for every pixel a random choice about its colour, independently of all the other pixels. Many artists have constructed random samples of "the m x n grid", for very small values of m and n; this results in the familiar "randomized checker boards" which were the icons of early chance art.

Now the thing about these randomized checkerboards is, that to the human observer they all look alike. If we define the set of paintings or screen-images as the set of m x  n pixel-grids, then virtually all of these will look the same. If the resolution is high enough, they will look like evenly grey planes. This kind of chance art thus gets very close to the monochrome.

Chance art comes into its own when the artists vary the specification of the set of possibilities which are considered by the sampling procedure. For different series of works they tend to employ different "image grammars", which typically define a small repertoire of shapes with a small number of variable properties. The random choices must then be made within the set of possibilities specified by the image grammar. For instance: a random number of dots with randomly chosen sizes is placed on randomly chosen positions; or, a random number of lines with randomly chosen lengths and directions is placed on randomly chosen positions; or, one line is drawn through a randomly chosen sequence of points.
In work like this, the promise of surprise and diversity, which is implicit in the idea of an "arbitrary image", does not pan out. The decisions of the artist (which elements, which variable parameters, what range of variation) largely determine the character of the resulting image; the random choice which is made within the constraints of the image grammar does in fact not make that much of a difference.

Artificial Art


Chance artists were nevertheless content with such simple systems, since these were sufficient to put forward the very idea of chance. But to really take on the project of the arbitrary painting, we need more; we need a formal language which allows us to assign distinct codes to perceptually different paintings, but also to assign the same code to perceptually equivalent paintings whose details may nevertheless differ considerably (as in the case of the different instantiations of Morellet's random pixels).

Algebras like this have been developed already for characterising specific styles. Harold Cohen, for instance, embued his drawing program AARON with an original style reminiscent of the COBRA painters. Programs which try to mimic existing artists have also been developed, for instance for Miró and Diebenkorn. The 'arbitrary painting' project, however, requires a system with a much richer repertoire of stylistic possibilities, and with the capability to exploit those possibilities in a very flexible way -- so that the degree of stylistic coherence within a painting (or within an exhibition) is itself a parameter whose value can be chosen at random.

From a completely different perspective, the psychology of Gestalt perception has also developed some coding languages which are relevant for our purpose -- for instance, in the work by Leeuwenberg and Buffart in Nijmegen on the mental representation of drawings built up out of straight line segments, and in the work by Lerdahl and Jackendoff in Boston on the perception of music.

Mathematically formulated image-generation processes can easily be combined and generalized. This makes it possible to put large numbers of chance-art ideas together into one super-chance-art-machine which reaches a complexity that cannot be surveyed any more by individual artists.

To take a simple example: In the chance art of the sixties one often encounters programs which repeat a particular shape (usually a square or a circle) in an arbitrary, unorderly manner on different positions on the plane. Other, similar algorithms create arbitrary closed shapes by combining line segments. These two algorithms can be combined in an obvious way, so that both the shape and the position of the image elements are determined at random. Other algorithms generate a multitude of different regular patterns or regular shapes; these can also be integrated. We may thus gradually abolish choice, by avoiding the exclusion of any choice -- by affirming every choice, and by putting every choice on a par with all other choices inside an all-encompassing probabilistic system. Art generation systems based on this approach are being developed in the project "Artificial" at the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam.

The constructivist tradition was concerned with harmony and purity. Today, that seems a somewhat arbitrary and limited ideal. Expressionism taught us the esthetics of ugliness. Duchamp demonstrated the esthetics of indifference. The current challenge is an esthetics that encompasses everything: beautiful, ugly, and indifferent.


References


Edward Ball and Robert Knafo: "The R. Mutt Dossier", Artforum, October 1988, p. 115.

Pierre Cabanne: Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp. Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond. 1967.

John Cage: "Lecture on Nothing" Incontri Musicali, August 1959. [Silence. Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973, pp. 109-126.]

David Carrier: "Danto as Systematic Philosopher or comme on lit Danto en français." In: Mark Rollins (ed.): Danto and his critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p. 26, note 10.

Michel Conil Lacoste: Tinguely. L'Énergétique de l'Insolence. Vol. I. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1989.

Marcel Duchamp: "Apropos of 'Readymades'." Art and Artists, 1, 4 (July 1966). [Lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961.]

Thierry de Duve: Au nom de l'art. Pour une archéologie de la modernité. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1989, p. 118-119.

Huge Harry: "A Computational Perspective on Twenty-First Century Music." Contemporary Music Review, 14, 3 (1995), pp. 153-159. [http://iaaa.nl/hh/brettonh.html ]

K.G. Pontus Hultén: Tinguely. 'Méta'. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975.


Pontus Hulten: Jean Tinguely. A Magic Stronger than Death. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987.

Dalia Judovitz: "Rendez-vous with Marcel Duchamp: Given", Dada/Surrealism 16, University of Iowa, 1987, p. 187.

Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1799, § 45. [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1974.]

Jean-François Lyotard: "Die Erhabenheit ist das Unkonsumierbare. Ein Gespräch mit Christine Pries am 6.5.1988." Kunstforum International, 100 (April/May 1989), pp. 355/356.

Mary A. McCloskey: Kant's Aesthetic. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987, p.108.

Remko Scha: "Artificiële Kunst." Informatie en Informatiebeleid 6, 4 (1988). [English translation: "Artificial Art."
http://iaaa.nl/rs/artkunstE.html ]

Remko Scha:
"Readymades, Artificial Art, New Media." In: Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager (eds.): Exploding Aesthetics. L&B Series of Philosophy of Art and Art Theory, Vol. 16. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001.