I studied fine art in college. Specifically, majoring in painting at Elam art school in New Zealand. My department was based in two dangerously dilapidated and leaky ancient colonial villas referred to euphemistically as “the mansions” (they were condemned and demolished a short time after I graduated). I spent hours there painting.The department had somewhat perversely used some of its annual budget to buy something called “The Painting Machine”. It became a big subject to those of us who acquired skills and were training to paint stuff. Was this machine going to make us obsolete? A lot of my work became a response to the anxiety of studying painting in a world where I thought a machine could just paint anything. I painted the same portrait or picture of a flower over and over to imitate the cold repetition of an automaton. One of my artist’s intent manifestos for school simply read “Ruban, you’re a machine”, which someone had said to me when they discovered I’d often stay all night in the mansions working.
Eventually the device arrived and was set up in part of the school. Not in the rickety old mansions with us mere mortals but in a newer, cleaner part of the school where the video art and more conceptual or “relevant” art was being made. Honestly, I was somewhat terrified. I went to watch one of the first paintings made by the machine. It whirred and whined in that way you expect a robot to whir and whine as it operated, and in a short amount of time it completed its artwork. Slowly I realized upon surveying the huge canvas that it was surprisingly lifeless and ugly. The way it applied and mixed paint revealed it for what it was: just a giant printer. Unable to say anything of interest other than what its human operator had to say. I realized then that an artist will always be safe from obsoletion. This was just an inert tool. This was just another machine.
