Martin Schapiro - Turing's Dog Playmat

Open Edition, Printed Earthenware, 2023.

As artificial intelligence makes it increasingly possible to fold aesthetic-compositional tasks into computer-run processes, automation encroaches on art and design. My work asks how close automation is to replacing the artist’s labor in the ceramic studio—a space often understood as insulated from computer technology. At a time when screenwriters and actors strike to achieve protections for their creative labor, artists must act to better understand these threats.

Produced with 3D software and a clay printer, this series challenges the viewer to look closely at the work of the artist alongside the work of the machine. Can the viewer determine where the artist’s hand begins and ends? Are there opportunities to find soulful expression in the algorithm’s rational—and irrational—output? Can our eyes learn to parse what a machine has spoken?

Even as these works aim to engage the viewer around issues of outsourcing creative labor to machines, they also risk advancing the very technologies poised to threaten artists’ livelihoods. The more we use these tools, the better they become at mimicking us. Training the human eye to discern machine-produced art objects may not outweigh this existential risk.

Turing’s Dog Playmat takes the form of a foam tile mat sometimes used in dog training. The art object is cast as a lowly training ground where the logician Alan Turing might have exercised his animals. With humor and some nihilism, this work acknowledges that advancement towards artificial intelligence might leave the artist under the heel of technology. 

-Schapiro