Automation Art

When Holger Nicolai left the advertising industry around the turn of the millennium, he was looking back at three decades right at the centre of its revolution. Now spending most of his time in his house on Ibiza, he focused primarily on painting through intense study and reproduction of old masters. During his examination of David Hockney’s extensive range of experimentation, like the integration of the iPad as a creative medium, he began thinking about a unique technological mode of artistic expression. The question emerged, if not yet explicit: Could computers assume the role of the producing artist?

Simultaneously with his departure from the ad business, he met Anton Koch, who at that time was launching his career during the global IT-boom as a founder and software developer in Hamburg, Germany. The two struck up a friendship and began an intensive exchange on art, zeitgeist, and technology.

About a decade later, during a fateful week on Ibiza, the two eventually made a pact to turn their speculations into actions. Anton’s line of work already centred around the exploitation of emerging technologies for commercial applications, so they laid the foundation for their virtual art-factory.

Three busy years later, now joined by Rufina Lorenz as a creative partner and producing under the moniker „X“, the first physical artworks saw the light of day. They emerged from what had become a fully automated production process that builds on a principle of artistic reproduction and translation from painting to woodcut dating back to the 16th century. Their approach to creative production taps into the Internet as our collective visual memory, but combines it with current paradigms of digital automation and artificial intelligence, harnessing their disruptive effects on so-called „real time“ in a creative process.

This way, thousands of sketches are continually being produced which can be selectively transferred into a unique physical artefact using a special, plastic printing process. The human now acts merely as a catalyst and curator, working with a multitude of machines as creative actors. This consequent application of contemporary industrial production practice using „creative robots“ is what Nicolai and Koch have dubbed „Automation Art“.