Raw chance has always played an important role in Dan Wolger's art. In the early 1990s, he shook up the art world by paying an advertising agency to make his art, resulting in an entire gallery exhibition.
In the series of pictures "Wolgers then and now", he has instead left his artistry in the hands of Chat GPT, who has been commissioned to make paintings of the works in Rembrandt's style.
There were quite a few adventures along the way, the robot is extremely careless but I can't blame it.
Here is now the telephone directory with its own telephone number on the outside and 100 other Wolgers works, all reproduced in a brownish-yellow color scheme taken from the “Batavian Pledge of Allegiance” at the National Museum. No image has been improved afterwards and he had to scrap some.
Sometimes it just became like an old beer hall, back in the days when people smoked indoors.
“It fought”
It all started with him wanting to build his conceptual predecessor Marcel Duchamp's sculptures in cardboard for an exhibition in Tomelilla this summer, but couldn't figure out how to do it. Wolgers was asked to ask an AI engine to make drawings, but soon discovered the impossibility of formulating himself so that it understood what he wanted help with.
I also asked it to make a picture of “a bladeless knife without a handle”, it struggled and struggled.
But isn't it just instructing and "prompting" your Chat GPT to spit out paintings? Sometimes, but not often, according to Wolgers, who says he managed to challenge his chat bot so much that it asked him to switch to another AI service.
Copyright
In some cases, the AI bot understood that the image represented a work of art by a living artist and refused to “paint” it, citing copyright infringement. Several times, it found the images of Wolger’s work to be too indecent.
–Then I could be blocked for a week. That's because you shouldn't be doing child porn, notes Wolgers, whose AI, for example, refused to paint over the photograph of a chubby angel figure: a completely ordinary putti.
It didn't work.
The drawings for the cardboard Duchamp are still not done.
Will you continue to make AI art?
It's basically exhausted now. I have to move on.
Erika Josefsson/TT
Facts: Dan Wolgers
TT
Born: 1955.
Background: Attended the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts 1980–85 and at the same time worked part-time at the Moderna Museet where, among other things, he repaired the mechanical sculptures.
He had previously worked at a preschool but quit abruptly when he discovered that he thought the children were more fun than they thought he was.
Breakthrough: Made a breakthrough in the early 1990s as an idea-based conceptual artist, after, among other things, decorating Stockholm's telephone directory (Yellow Pages) with his own telephone number.
He answered all the calls and called back the many who left messages on his answering machine. The art project was only interrupted when he changed studios and was not allowed to take his phone number with him.
Restarts: During his career, he has emptied his studio of all his artwork twice. The first time, he took the rubble to a tree in Wanås Sculpture Park and asked visitors to take what they wanted – an art project entitled “All is forgiven”. The second time, the art was purchased by Moderna Museet in Stockholm after he emptied the studio for an exhibition.
Current: With the exhibition "70" at Galleri Hedenius in Stockholm (until 20/12) which will then be shown at Stockholm's Auktionsverk in Gothenburg and Malmö.
