ART MACHINES
MACHINE ART

In general we presume that artists make art, but what happens when machines produce art? Do artists then become engineers? What does the apparent withdrawal of the artist from the creative act mean, and what consequences for the originality and the uniqueness of the work of art result from it? What is a work of art in the first place in such cases: the machine, the product, or the act of production? What role is granted the viewer in the course of production: interaction or exclusion? Beginning with Jean Tinguely’s drawing machines of the 1950s, an exhibition conceived jointly by the Schirn and the Museum Tinguely in Basel will present art machines from various contexts right up to the present – such as works by Michael Beutler and Roxy Paine. The exhibition space becomes a production space.
Curators: Katharina Dohm (Schirn) and Dr. des. Heinz Stahlhut (Museum Tinguely, Basel)

link

So lately I have been thinking about the automation of various elements of life. It started when I was playing Angband, a text based hack-n-slash style roleplaying game. I used to play this game for hours and hours as a teenager. Nothing much happens in it except you run around and kill monsters and get treasure. Everything in the game is represented by ASCII characters. All of the maps are randomly generated each time you access a level. A couple of weeks ago I dug the game out and started playing it because I wanted to grab the maps and start making some prints from them. I did not want to have to loose hours and hours playing the game again so I found a "borg," a AI program that will play the game for me. It was absolutely fascinating. Instead of playing the game for hours and hours, I watched the computer play the game. Essentially I had found a program that would play my computer game for me so I could go about doing different things. This lead me to thinking about other areas of our leisure culture that we automate...

Recently I Rhizome.org there was a post about the show mentioned above, about artists' machines that make art.