The Machines Wave Back

Abstract

What are the general latitudes of “autonomy” described in contemporary and historical autonomous art systems practices, and what might the threshold and terminal conditions be for an art-making system’s autonomy? This exploration sets about the task of describing, categorizing and attempting to model the degrees and qualities of system-level autonomy in Autonomus Art Systems―and what the outer limits of that autonomy might be in an art-making context. The goals of this investigation are to develop and clarify a new way to frame discussions of autonomous art systems, to complicate generally accepted notions of artist-AAS relationships and to a propose a new autonomy and agency model-based of AAS with ideas borrowed from software engineering, sociology and other fields.