Week 3 Art and Robotics

For this week’s blog, I would like to take a closer look at the automatization of industry, as well as the impacts of such industrial advances on art and the new world. For as long as civilization has existed, humankind has pushed for efficiency in their work. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 was only the initiation of manufacturing’s transition to the increasingly automated, repetitive, and robotic systems of production that we now see today. 

Printing Press

As our world becomes more and more automated, with everything now identically mass produced down to the finest specifics, the value of art has diminished with the increasing abundance of nearly identical replicas. Benjamin Walter stressed this idea in his book “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art”(XII). Walter then proceeds to detail how artworks themselves can have their values changed as a direct result of availability to the masses.

Davis Douglas provides a fresher take on Walter’s ideas in his 1995 paper “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction”. In it, Douglas writes of how digitalization of media has made it harder and harder to distinguish between original artworks and reproductions: “There is no clear conceptual distinction now between original and reproduction in virtually any medium based in film, electronics, or telecommunications”(Douglas 381). The nature of these new forms of media meant that artworks became easily accessible to the masses. Recently, however, it feels like this is changing due to the introduction of Non Fungible Tokens, or NFTs for short.

NFT is a kind of way to authenticate digital art

As the technologies of our society continue to advance, it seems inevitable that there must come a day and age when everything we know is replaced by fully capable automatons. Over this past summer, I read a book series called Arc of a Scythe, set in a dystopian (or utopian, depending on how you see it) future where everything is controlled by Artificial Intelligence. There is too much detail to go into about the series for this blog, but the story raises a significant dialogue about the future of humanity once we accomplish all that we have set out for.

Alternate book cover for one of the Scythe books

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936.

Davis, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995).” Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 5, 1995, pp. 381–386. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1576221. Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.

Shwartzman, Jessica. “'Scythe': A Dystopian World Fresh off the Shelf.” "Scythe": A Dystopian World Fresh off the Shelf, The Justice, 11 Feb. 2020, www.thejustice.org/article/2020/02/scythe-by-neal-shusterman.

Brooks, Rodney. “Robots Will Invade Our Lives.” TED, Feb. 2003, www.ted.com/talks/rodney_brooks_robots_will_invade_our_lives.

Whipps, Heather. “How Gutenberg Changed the World.” LiveScience, Future US Inc, 26 May 2008, www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.html.