AI + Art = Creative Intelligence
Tech-based artists are merging their creative right brains with their analytical left brains. Does this holistic approach change art for art’s sake into art as a visual prompt? I asked Alex Dodge.

I saw Alex Dodge’s art for the first time in 2008 at the Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. The starring installation, Study for Intelligent Design, featured an android. Masterfully rendered, it had been torn limb from limb and tossed out with office garbage. The youthful face, spewing wire brains, had me puzzling over its purpose, end, and feet; they were bare, dirty, and worn. Strangely, I felt sorry for a piece of silicone. Nearby tech tools rendered in a coloring book style were scribbled in with crayons. The suggestion that 21st-century children would play on screens instead of playgrounds, was unsettling.
At the time, his work felt a bit science fiction-y, but it was on target then and continues to be prescient. Digital pioneers, like Dodge, are merging their analytical left brains (coding and systems) with their creative right brains (imagination and curiosity). Does this holistic approach transform art for art’s sake into art as a visual prompt? I asked Alex Dodge.

JM – You have the abilities needed to succeed in STEM fields, but you chose art as your profession. Why?
In a sense, it was always there from the start. My mother is an artist, and that somehow found its way into all three of her sons. So, ‘it’ (art) was always part of the environment, a secondary or primary language of sorts.
We often build our identity first through affinity and then through difference, maybe a merging of the two later. I suppose I inherited more of my father’s scientific and technical ability; he studied chemistry and then medicine. I always felt split between technology and art from a very young age and, for a long time, felt like these things could not be reconciled or integrated. That yearning to define oneself that we all feel early on, for me, it was initially in the direction of science—marine biology, then physics—but the gravity of art was always stronger.

JM – Over time, your work has reflected on the consequences of pervasive technology. Obviously, tech intrigues you, but does it also scare you?
It’s something I think about a lot. It’s probably one of the central themes in my work. At first, the question of technology can seem intractable. It’s often simplified, at least in the West, into the tension between Modernity and a kind of Romanticism.
It might seem like a tidy diametric of conflicting paradigms, and I love Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films that exemplify that narrative of nature—the pure, youthful innocents against technology and the corrupted adult system—all with splendid style and poetry. But the reality is that they are intrinsically linked and intertwined.
Language and other technologies allow us to step outside ourselves, to define the self, and, in so doing, further evolve those technologies. So, it’s a continuous cycle that feeds back on itself.

JM – Your studies of Nigel, the android, and the bather are very clever and beautiful. That’s a tricky balance to reach.
Thank you. I hope they are successful in that way. The Muppet-like characters arose out of a need for greater emotional capability during the pandemic. Somehow, the human-like but not actually human quality of those characters achieves something indirectly for me that direct figuration could not. The typically cute children’s characters caught in moments of introspection and inner thought get to the place I needed to go. The bathers were more tricky because they come much closer to being human but reveal their synthetic origin through their sewn seamlines. They are more unsettling in that way, so it’s a trade-off, I suppose.

Dodge begins his paintings on screen, using software to create a virtual setting, characters, and props. I’ll call it theatrical sketching because it allows his “players” to give him feedback as he tests various layouts. This process also allows him to reflect on and shape his vision.
JM – Has working with software given you more time to contemplate your paintings?
Just as written language allows us to see our thoughts in a different way, I believe that the virtual is a way of seeing rather than an end in itself. It allows me to see things I wouldn’t otherwise, so in a sense, it opens the door to things that no amount of time could otherwise. Ideas like a metaverse or alternate virtual reality seem misguided and bizarre to me, though. Information is inherently physical. You can’t escape that fact.
JM – You’ve been using a puffy paint that rises up from the surface. What inspired your interest in visual/tactile imagery?
I think I’ve always had a love for the material gesture, a love for paint—not just the image. We live in a world consumed by the agnostically smooth and impersonal surfaces of screens, so that has a lot to do with it, too. It’s about creating an object that differentiates itself in this world.
Physicality is crucial, in my view. I had been writing a lot about different ways to make images with paint, and the stencil was something I kept coming back to. Screen printing uses a woven mesh matrix to hold a stencil capable of incredible detail and complexity but is inherently very thin, too. I eventually arrived at laser-cut stencils combined with computer-generated imagery to create deposits of oil color on canvas with visceral effect but exacting precision—a balance between immediacy, material presence, and complexity. An artist’s process is a negotiation between their needs and their capabilities/resources (or lack thereof), between their nature and nurture, I suppose.

JM – Has experimenting with new tech tools alienated you from the hand-made-only crowd?
I first started using 3D modeling to construct virtual spaces for my paintings way back in 2001. It was a pretty lonely place back then. Very few artists were doing it, and there was very little support at first. In 2007, I made a drypoint engraving titled ‘The Legendary Coelacanth’ using a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) engraver at Pace Prints with Andre Ribuoli. It was published by Forth Estate with Glen Baldridge and Luther Davis. When it was first shown at the EAB (Editions, Artist’s Books) fair, I heard that the artist Kiki Smith walked over, intrigued by the print. But when she heard how it was made, she exclaimed, “That’s cheating!” So, that sentiment will always be there. And in a way, Smith was right. You bet I am cheating, and historically, when people have cheated, it often meant they were out in front of something, and it took time for people to catch up.
Is the hand sacred? Well, yes, it is sacred, but it’s always being redefined and extended too. The hand is always there; you can’t get rid of it. My work is incredibly manual, in fact. I use the tools I do because, in a way, my work is about the tools.
I think at the heart of the tension is that these things, however physical they may be, are abstracted out of view. That’s significant, even troubling because it presents a serious power differential if the user doesn’t or can’t understand their tools. But it actually goes much deeper than basic Marx.
I can’t recommend enough the recent post by L.M. Sacasas, ‘The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life.’ It uses the recent ad by Apple titled “Crush,” which needs no introduction, to talk about the work of Albert Borgman, a philosopher of technology. I had read Borgman in the past but somehow missed his idea of the device paradigm. Borgman argued that devices are characterized by a tendency to abstract their inner workings out of view from the user, reducing friction as much as possible so that the experience of using them is not only intuitive but safe and easy, like an iPad.
He contrasts this against what he calls focal things, which require practice to master, like a musical instrument and a fundamental understanding of how they work. Again, binaries are ever more seductive, but the danger here is real because the way we relate to devices is very different from focal things. Devices are essentially disposable, whereas a mastered instrument is precious. Not understanding one’s tools as an artist is unsettling, to put it mildly. It certainly was for me. By 2009, I had been using an array of different software to make my work but didn’t really understand what was going on below the UI.
That’s what primarily motivated me to go back to grad school at NYU’s ITP program. It was a blur of two years immersed in code and a wonderful group of people. When I emerged, it would take another two years to figure out how to use what I had learned, but it helped my work in more ways than I can say. There is a space adjacent to the device, a different type of focal thing, and that’s where I try to reside.

JM – Just what is it that makes today’s technology so disruptive, yet so appealing?
The other day, I was listening to an interview with the Danish author Tor Nørretranders. He made a case against the often-heard explanation for the woes of modern life: that we are overwhelmed by too much information. He argued that technological systems actually simplify and reduce the amount of information in our environment and how we experience them, so that our angst is a result of a lack of information or variety of information. We may be overwhelmed by a very narrow band of information that lacks meaning. He contrasted a natural wilderness with the concrete jungle of the city, claiming there is far more information in the former. I’m still considering this proposition.
I take walks in the woods near my house, and I feel like the way I relate to that environment is very different compared to an urban setting. The complexity of a natural ecosystem is likely unknowable, whereas a computational system probably is.
Perhaps the allure of our technological systems is their ease and ever more frictionless convenience, but that optimization may be starving us of essential nutrients we didn’t know we needed. Again, Borgman and Tim Wu, via L.M. Sacasas, have views that align well. Their views, nor my own, are necessarily against technology—my practice is probably inseparable from it at this point—but I do feel that how we orient ourselves toward technology and information systems is important.
