Teaching A Computer To Draw_ 2025 
Code, Screen, Mac Mini, Plexiglass 
 
In the 1960s, engineers at Bell Labs were obsessed with teaching computers to make art. They believed that if you could teach a machine to draw, you could teach it to think.

I’ve coded this funny and absurd algorithmic artwork as an attempt to get the computer to draw using its core desktop functions as a standalone close network unit. It sits in its Plexiglass box, separated from the room, not connected to the internet — quietly scanning images looking for smiley faces, hearts, eyes. The kind of symbols you see every day and forget about. Like a car number plate that seems to spell out initials of a loved one. Or a cloud that looks a bit like a dog. You think it’s coincidence. The machine reads it as data.


It’s trained from an ambiguous data set—imagery that can be interpreted, or misinterpreted, in multiple ways depending on the viewer. Symbols that coincidentally appear in our everyday lives. Like a rock that resembles a love heart. Or, birds in the sky that look like a cartoon face. But the machine just looks for patterns. Codified symbols; like the smiley face, it doesn’t see the birds or the sunset. What does it understand of the world if it only looks for patterns and symbols? What does the computer see when it scans images—and how different are we, as humans?

  

We, too, instinctively see things for more than they physically are. Seeking meaning and understanding from a chaotic and noisy set of sensory stimuli, looking for something we recognise, but sometimes reading into these things codes that they may not inherently posses. Through language, we have the unique ability to share our understanding of the world, collectively shaping and assigning meaning and reimagining symbols that come to define our shared reality and understanding of the present moment in time. This search for meaning is how we make sense of the world relative to our place in it. In doing so, we participate in the ongoing flux of culture. But what is lost when we use the computer as the lens to see the world through? And, now with AI, we don’t just use computers to see the world, we talk about our understanding of reality with them, and expect a response?

That’s what Sherry Turkle — a researcher at MIT — is worried about. She said that if we let machines into our emotional lives, we’ll end up in relationships that are only about ourselves. She thought that talking to a robot — even a helpful, sympathetic one — would make us worse at being human. It sounds melodramatic. But it turns out to be weirdly prescient.

“those who succumb to the seductions of robot companionships will be stranded in relationships that are only about one person…the absence of the emotion [on the part of the computer] reduces the scope of rationality [for the human] because we literally think with our feelings.”

Turkle believes that our feelings shape a part of how we think. And if we strip those out — because machines don’t have them — we’re left with something cold and closed off to the world. As humans, we don’t see clearly. We are social animals, tainted by our being and our proximity to each other. We are very different from computers. But what does the computer see?


“Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it does see clearly, because I can’t any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone’s sake the scanners do better, because if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I do, then I’m cursed, and cursed again."

Philip K. Dick stole that from Apostle Paul, well the idea at least. It’s from his novel A Scanner Darkly, but it first appeared in 1 Corinthians 13:12 (King James Version), "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."Paul originally wrote in Greek before the King James translation to English in 1611. At the time of writing and translation, a glass referred to what we know today as a mirror.

In A Scanner Darkly, Bob Arctor, the protagonist, is literally split between his identities: the narcotics agent “Fred” and the addict “Arctor.” He sees footage of himself, surveils himself, and begins to misrecognize himself in the most literal and painful sense. Jacques Lacan would have loved this. He thought we’re all trapped in some kind of symbolic maze. That we think we see ourselves in the mirror — but actually it’s just a fantasy. A version of us we wish was real.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the mirror stage is when a child first identifies with its reflection, creating a misrecognized but cohesive image of the self—a fantasy of unity that papers over the actual fragmented, chaotic experience of being. Lacan would insist that the subject, in this case Bob Arctor, is always divided—between the symbolic (language, law, societal identity) and the real (raw experience, unrepresentable truth). For both Arctor, and yourself reading this, you are not self-contained. You are spoken, seen, and structured by something beyond you—and that something is always partly unknown.

The self is seen but never truly grasped; unity is illusion.

We could interchange self for truth in this:

Truth is experienced but never truly grasped; understanding is illusion.

Both, the self and truth, are prejudiced and relative illusions, built on top of the framework of learnt language, societal traditions and subjective interpretation of sensory stimuli. We’re thrown into a state of confrontation—with radical choice (we are free, so must choose who we are, even without certainty) and radical otherness (we are shaped by forces that we don’t control—language, desire, the unconscious—and can’t fully understand). Lacan may argue, Arctor is a subject split across the Imaginary (how he sees himself), Symbolic (the role he plays in society), and Real (the raw, ungraspable truth of his breakdown), unable to unify his identity, and so he becomes lost to others and to himself.

Through societal alienation and individual cognitive architecture, we are cursed. Unable to know anything fully. Trapped into only having one personal truth and one personal self at a moment in time. In a world of multiple registers of reality. Condemning us to a life of altered states. Alone together, wondering; now may be all there is. Confusing stuff, but how does this relate to the computer?

The thing is, this curse is relevant only to us, as humans. The way one brain is wired, at a particular moment in time, is painfully alien to all other human brains, and its past and future. Our way of thinking is unique, constructed through lived experience. This means, unlike computers, it’s near impossible to transplant ideas from one person to another cleanly. Our best attempts are slow, murky and clumsy, completely abstracted and above all, entirely tainted by the receiver.

Here’s Geoffrey Hinton talking about this:


We do this by using verbal and visual language as our way of sharing our relative perception of the world. Then we figured out how to distil information in the form of symbols, writing, records, audio and data.

This meant we could build a wealth of knowledge that can surpass our finite moment in time or what one person could learn in a lifetime. The science fiction author William Gibson thinks this tradition becomes like a prosthetic memory, completely changing what it means to be human. It captures something of the present moment, compresses it into something duplicatableand distributable, and sends it into the future so that it is another self, a different self, can consume, interpret and learn the distilled information relative to their brain.

This, in a way, is probably the most important thing we do as humans. We are all wired so differently, allowing for an array of cognitive diversity within our species, and if we have learnt anything from evolution, then diversity, along with an enormous amount of luck, is the key to survival. But it would seem this might turn out to be our Achilles Heel, cognitive diversity and unique data training sets make it demonstrably inefficient to share information.

Here’s William Gibson talking about this:


Back to computers, who are really fantastic at sharing information. Computers and AI systems—particularly large neural networks—can be trained using massive parallelism. This means they can be split across thousands of GPUs or TPUs, processing enormous datasets in parallel. Once trained, the resulting model contains the "knowledge" distributed across its weights, and can be copied and deployed anywhere. They have the same thinking architecture, so knowledge can be copied and stored. Once known, once. Known by all, forever.

But here’s the thing: the computer doesn’t care.

It doesn’t have a self to get confused about. It doesn’t care if the smiley face means happiness, irony, or sarcasm. It just logs the curve of the mouth and tries to replicate it. That’s the difference. Because humans don’t just process information. We project. We fantasise. We misunderstand — in ways that are rich and complex and culturally shaped, and completely stupid. That is what culture is, and what we have been building since our ancestors developed language. Even if a computer can draw, I’m not sure we could recognise it’s thinking unless it could also experience feelings and wonder about itself and its place in the world.

It just draws.
Because that’s what I told it to do.




References:
Alone Together by Sherry Turkle; Geoffrey Hinton’s research on ambiguous line drawings and probabilistic models in AI learning; internet culture; Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky; Philip K. Dick’s novels A Scanner Darkly and VALIS; Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of le regard; and Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze.