Paper short abstract:

In terms of authorship as conceptual lens to understanding what the digital interactions and machines are doing in our time and age. The work attempts to deal more explicitly with aesthetics and interaction, where participants are invited to share their creative skills.

Paper long abstract:

An important lens through which we can study some of the divisions of what it means to be human and what it means to be a machine in this digital age is through asking questions of authorship. In my work, I do engage in practices of interactive arts. In short, my projects have been building on computational models to create some interaction with the audience coming to experience my machines. Authorship is a potentially broad concept, but in this context, we will think of it as questioning who is the creator of the art: the artist, the machine that interactively created the output, or the participants that interacted with it, feeding the machine with their input?

When we place digital interactions alongside other materials and media, new opportunities to explore interactive art experiences arise. The machine is given more and more intentionality and autonomy in this digital era. We get self-driving cars, robots and smart adaptive services based on big data. This development in a sense started already with the digital revolution at the turn of the last century or even earlier with the industrial revolution. In this paper, we have returned to one of the biggest questions asked at the time of early industrialism: if the machines can act on their own, creating mass-manufactured objects, can they then also create art - the ultimate human expression?