MAGICAL REALISM: The Synthetic Reality of Machine Generated Art And Space
JIAHAO ZHENG
ARC 242 M011
Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature.
Jorge Luis BorgesArtificial Imagination is a complex and dynamic system that emerges within intelligent machines that challenge the linear and disciplined human brain. The new technological revolution promotes new trajectories for design and visualization in the twenty-first century. As artificial Intelligence explores its creative potential through machine learning, magical realism becomes the new rhetoric device, derived from literature, for AI to create interweaving forms and ideas that penetrate the real and virtual world. Therefore, the exhibition centers on how magical realism empowers machines’ imagination to generate flashbacks of immersive art and spaces that render people’s ordinary perception through illusions and effects of synthetic reality.
Imagining a monument made of children’s toys or a medieval knight with the head of a chicken, all of these enchanting scenes are works by magical realist painter Alberto Savinio. (fig 1). Magical realism is a literary and artistic genre that depicts oneiric or grotesque scenes. At the same time, the main subject remains to be everyday objects, illustrating the interaction between real-life objects and fanatical settings. “Magical Realism” or “Realismo Magico” in Italian is a literary term that characterizes modernist fiction in the early Twentieth Century by novelist Massimo Bontempelli. Bontempelli emphasizes the incomprehensible power and the mysterious and fantastical quality of reality in his influential magazine “900 Novecento”. In the magazine, Bontempelli proposed the formula for avant-garde literature: “precisione realistica e atmosfera magica”1, which aims to create the bond between realistic precision and magical atmosphere in writing.2 Bontempelli’s short novel exemplifies the
1 Bontempelli, Massimo. “900” Cahiers D’italie Et D’europe. Roma: “La Voce”, 1926. 2 GUENTHER, IRENE. “Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic.” Magical Realism, 1995, pp. 33–74., https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw5w1.6.
formula, portraying a magical setting with accurate and detailed narration to create contrast in the atmosphere. In his short novel collection, The Faithful Lover, Bontempelli writes, “What I care about is that none of you know what the woods are like when all the leaves are fluttering, how to smoke whistles when it sets a tree on fire; and you’re locked up in here when outside all the stars are blazing. I want air, water, and earth. I’m in prison when I’m with you.”1 In this quote, Bontempelli gives magical quality and vibrant life to the mundane objects in nature to reflect the hope and prospect aroused from the protagonist’s mind. The subtle strangeness and the disruption of reality exhibited in magical realism literature provide the theoretical basis for Artificial Imagination to grasp people’s senses and perception of the world through magical imagery. The lively visual objects contrast with an unworldly environment, creating a surreal and vibrant space that uncages people’s imaginations.
Bottempelli’s ideology has continued to influence the literary movement in Latin America, and prominent novelists such as Alejo Carpentier and Luis Borges adopted magical realism in the continent with different cultural and political backgrounds than Europe. Among Latin American writers, magical realism is viewed as a refined aesthetic expression within the indigenous continent that initiates the emancipation of cultural identity.2 Carpentier’s “ The American Marvelous Real” theory burgeons from the disparate belief system between the European and the Indigenous American. Carpentier argued in his essay that the marvelous emerges from an unanticipated transformation of reality, or amplifications of the scale of the reality, as a result of an exaltation of the spirit that takes it to a kind of extreme state.3 Here, Carpentier advocates a thematic form of magical realism to uncover the
1 Bontempelli, Massimo, and Estelle Gilson. The Faithful Lover. Host Publications, 2007.
2 Warnes, Christopher. Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
3 Carpentier, Alejo. “On the Marvelous Real in America (1949).” Magical Realism, 1995, 75–88. https://doi. org/10.1215/9780822397212-004.
historical and cultural wonders concealed within the rich heritage of Latin America, and foreground fantastical elements with the power of spirituality to contrast with a realistic and rational narrative in his writing. Carpentier’s renowned novel, The Kingdom Of This World, inspired by the author’s visit to Haiti, presents magical elements such as witchcraft and ghosts as the main magical narrative to illustrate the natural and human reality of the secluded continent.1 In the book, Carpentier uses native Haitian myth, such as the belief in metamorphosis to animal form and the power of nature, as signifiers of orders of knowledge to highlight patterns of historical repetition and the realist historiography against slavery and colonialism.
2As a result, Carpentier uses marvelous figurative language to portray the variegated cultural reality of Latin America. Carpentier depicts magical realism as the conflict between the rational view of reality and the acceptance of supernatural power as everyday occurrences.
Transitioning to the twenty-first century, the ideologies present in magical realism literature have a strong implication for art creation by Artificial Imagination. In the physical world, the analogy to the supernatural elements in literature is a digital technology and Artificial Intelligence. Machines can create a synthetic reality of magical occurrence that blends naturally into the physical environment while adhering to human’s ordinary perception and the law of physics. Bontempelli and Carpentier’s theory highlights the intersection between the unworldly sensations and the factual context of the culture and environment to capture the reader’s emotion. Similarly, artworks by AI are inspired by the dichotomy of reality and magical elements. The imagination of the machines correlates to Carpentier’s ideology that magical realism combines elements of reality and fantasy that capture the spirit of
the culture and space. In this case, these machine generated artwork reflect the state of the New World where people inhabited alongside the technological civilization by drawing connections with future metaphysics. Literary Critic Fredric Jameson provides a point of departure for new art forms from magical realism as “a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism.”1 According to Jameson, magical realism illustrates a world where traditional beliefs and practices coincide with modern technology and economic systems. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence utilizes people’s uncertainty towards the mystical future to create artworks with illusions and altering perspectives, resonating with the conversation between the known and unknown.
Borges argued that imagination tended to be fluid and interconnected with the world, and magical realism blurs the boundaries between self and non-self, between fantasy and reality. In Borges’s writing of “Avatar Of The Tortoise,” he stated that “We have dreamt the world. We have dreamt of it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space, and durable in time. Still, in its architecture, we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.”2 Here, Borges manifests the “tenuous and eternal” aspect of his imagination in writing. He envisioned the world as hallucinated and dreamlike, contrasting established materialized society and its order. As a result, magical realism becomes the manifestation of Artificial Imagination to envision the world’s fluid, changeable, and mystical nature. Machines utilize the literary aesthetic of magical realism, combined with modern technology, to unfold flashbacks of digital artwork that connect people with realities that synthesize the postmodern world’s eternal, organic, and mystical nature.
Through generative adversarial networks, artificial intelligence can transplant the unique characteristics of one object to another and incorporate the supernatural aspect of magical realism. An example of machine-hallucinated art through style transfer is that the art-generating algorithms can transfer the stripes from a zebra onto a horse.1 (fig 2) The ingenious combination of the richness of real detail and depth of imagination in machine-generated synthetic reality has high aesthetic value and creates astonishment for the viewers. The extra layer of dimension in Artificial Imagination can enlighten human intellectuality through analogy and act as the thirdperson perspective to help people understand the thinking process and emotional response behind human rationalization. According to scholar Neil Leach and his book “Architecture In The Age Of Intelligence”, art can facilitate the interaction between Artificial Intelligence and humans around a creative goal, which has the productive ambiguity of attempting something unknown, prompting development in both types of intelligence.2 Artificial Imagination has preserved the ability to render images that depict mystery, and the sublime, impacting people’s perception with the synthetic atmosphere rendered by magical realism. More importantly, Artificial Imagination can create an immersive environment by animating the surroundings and engaging with a multisensory experience. The immersive and hallucinated scenes can highlight the nonlinear nature of space and time and attract the viewers to explore the diversity in their imagination triggered by the machine-generated environment.
Artificial Imagination provides enormous algorithmic power for machines to perform their creativity in magical realism. As the computational power acquired
1 Campo, Matias, and Neil Leach. “Can Machines Influence Architecture? Ai as Design Method.” Architectural Design 92, no. 3 (2022): 6–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.2807.
2 Leach, Neil. Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022.
from machine learning grew, Artificial Intelligence was able to develop more complex intellectuality in addition to its training inputs. In the past, the machine’s creative power was limited to the boundaries set by the input dataset, with difficulty improvising its imagination outside of the limit. A machine’s creativity can be measured by its ability to process language. Metaphor is a figurative language to examine the machine’s imaginative power to create a new language model with new expressions that are not parallel to the machine’s input. In the twentieth century, Italian semiologist Umberto Eco admitted the drawback of machine’s ability to develop metaphors, “No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer’s precise instructions, no matter what the volume of organized information to be fed in.”1 Here, Umberto Eco admits the banality of machine imagination due to its static and rigid interpretation of language, lacking the ability to break from its programmed paradigm. However, machine learning grants Artificial Intelligence the power to master the art of language interpretation and artistic aesthetics in the TwentyFirst Century. In the journal “AI, Arts & Design: Questioning Learning Machines,” Andrews Burbano employs “Feel Think” to describe the shifting relationships of perception, emotion, and action that AI perceives from machine learning.2 The author argued that AI could learn autonomously, exploring creativity in art and language with no dependency on its programmed creative direction by humans. Unlike Umberto Eco’s assertion that “Computers are stupid machines that only work in the hands of smart people”, smart machines in the digital age can embrace human beings with their thinking power to develop brilliant ideas that escape from their static inputs, inviting people into a world full of uncertainty and possibility.
1 Eco, Umberto. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Basingstoke u.a.: Macmillan, 1985. 2 West, Ruth, and Andres Burbano. “Ai, Arts & Design: Questioning Learning Machines.” Artnodes. Accessed April 7, 2023. https://raco.cat/index.php/Artnodes/article/view/373964.
In addition to language, Artificial Intelligence developed parallel growth in its artistic abilities, such as visual, performing, and digital media. Computers are obligated to push the art creation process further and grasp people’s emotions. By absorbing countless art pieces, Artificial imagination has learned to use innovative aesthetics and artistic techniques to capture people’s sensations with stimulations such as novelties and fear. According to the journal “Digital Imagination, Fantasy, AI Art,” the author specifies that the fantasy portrayed by AI does not have to be experienced as accurate or resemble anything perceived, and AI is constantly changing.1 Artificial Intelligence relentlessly trains and excavates its artistic thinking through an iteration algorithm, learning from numerous input art pieces and improvising unforeseen imaginative power that revolutionizes the field of art creation. Artificial Imagination is co-shaped and co-shared by humans and algorithms. Therefore, machines use their robust intellectual agents to empower their ability to recognize and develop from their deposit of images when interacting with the artist’s imagination. After receiving the artist’s keyword command, the autonomous tool will use its machinelearning algorithms to mimic the sorting function of the human brain and produce artwork that combines elements from different drawings. The relationship between humans and machines is a convergence process between brains and computers, between scientists attempting to understand and artists attempting to create.2 Indeed, the interaction between two different types of intelligence, human and artificial intelligence, will yield a vibrant space of creative hybridity and establish a laboratory that elaborates the possibilities of synthesizing machine power with human imagination.
1 Wellner, Galit. “Digital Imagination, Fantasy, AI Art - Foundations of Science.” SpringerLink. Springer Netherlands, April 2, 2021. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-020-09747-0.
2 Agüera y Arcas, Blaise. “Art in the Age of Machine Intelligence.” Arts 6, no. 4 (2017): 18. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts6040018.
The radical growth of technology and machine power during the digital age serves as the metamorphosis of innovation and creativity, creating a dialogue between humans and machines, authorship and censorship, and finally, autonomy and automation. Alan Turing, the founding father of computation, predicted that “at the end of the 20th century it will be possible to program a machine to answer questions that will be extremely difficult to guess whether the answers are being given by a man or by the machine.”1 The democratization of machines as tools for art and creativity offers conversational opportunities between human and Artificial Intelligence. As independent creative entities, machines will offer countless potentials to liberate people’s limited creativity and unlimited possibilities ahead of human evolution. Because machines have a deeper understanding of human beings through machine learning, they acquire the power to create a synthetic reality space that speaks to people’s emotions. The combination of imagination and intelligence is being stored inside the mind of a machine and will grow infinitely. As a result, Artificial Imagination will combine the factual and supernatural aspects of magical realism and compose them into synthetic arts and spaces that facilitate people’s sensory responses and develop deeper awareness of nature and the world.
