The-Island-was-a-World_catalogue-digital

9 the Art Basel exhibition. Although this is not the place to judge the model's success and the validity of the study's findings, this example teaches us about the current discourse and research trends in the generative AI field. An overview of relinquished control in the history of art CAN-type projects that strive to decode and duplicate human genius through advanced technology keep emerging in the techno-cultural field. Yet, in the art field, explorations of the interface between art and AI are more complex and tentative. One such unique example is Oren Eliav's fascinating video work, The Island was a World , the focus of the Open University gallery exhibition. Unlike the technological effort to create an AI model simulating human creativity, Eliav goes into dialogue with several current AI models to navigate his own complex creative process. As a background for discussing The Island was a World , it is worthwhile to remember precedents in the history of art where relinquishing calculated control opened a path to domains beyond conscious thinking or ones that surpassed the human artist's technical capacities. I will briefly outline a historical axis that links two points: The Surrealist Movement, which flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, and early computer art (or algorithmic art), the terms used to describe the new media art that emerged in the 1960s. Among other landmarks of relinquished control that remain beyond the scope of this catalogue essay, I count Jackson Pollock's action painting, Andy Warhol's "industrial" practices, and Harold Cohen's AARON, an autonomic robotic painter. In his late 15 th century treatise on painting, Leonardo da Vinci reveals that Botticelli, his contemporary, told his students to fling paint-soaked sponges at the wall, believing that the resulting random stains could suggestively stimulate their painting, landscape formations in particular. About 500 years later, in the early 20 th century, the Surrealist painters adopted the decalcomania technique, where random paint stains are the starting points of a painting. During World War I and the period of upheaval that followed it, two art movements, Dada and Surrealism, adopted incidence and randomness as their central aesthetic principles. The Dada movement emerged in 1917 while war was still raging. Surrealism was declared in 1924 by a group of writers and poets, later joined by painters. To the Dadaists, legitimizing randomness in the creative process represented political-cultural subversion. By this, they intended to undermine the perception of artwork as representing an original and unique individual personality and talent, in other words, the concept of "artist" and thus divest the Fine Arts of their aura. The Surrealists, for their part, were inspired in relinquishing control by Freud's psychoanalysis. Excited by the idea of the concealed unconscious mind that motivates human consciousness and