These questions do not belong in the manifesto, but they are important for understanding, imagining, and building autonomous art.
The manifesto is intended for artists and engineers who will build autonomous art. It should be parsimonious, clear, and relevant. In the interest of parsimony, it should not spend time explaining itself in exacting legal or scientific detail. In the interest of clarity, it should avoid making mysterious and important-sounding generalizations. In the interest of relevance for artists and engineers, it should not go into the philosophical meaning of autonomy, agency, nor should it go into the art-historical import of these ideas.
Autonomy is the condition of self-governance—of being free from external control. Historically and etymologically, it was first used to describe states and institutions.
From the OED: "The condition or right of a state, institution, group, etc., to make its own laws or rules and administer its own affairs; self-government, independence. [...] More generally: liberty to follow one's will; control over one's own affairs; freedom from external influence, personal independence. With reference to a thing: the fact or quality of being unrelated to anything else, self-containedness; independence from external influence or control, self-sufficiency."
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Individual autonomy is an idea that is generally understood to refer to the capacity to be one's own person, to live one's life according to reasons and motives that are taken as one's own and not the product of manipulative or distorting external forces, to be in this way independent."
Let us call agents that act to ensure their own autonomy autonomy-preserving. For example, a robotic vacuum that moves around and vacuums is autonomous but not necessarily autonomy-preserving. A robotic vacuum that moves around, avoids getting stuck in corners, and periodically recharges itself is both autonomous and autonomy-preserving.
Functionally, this condition is important because it narrows the scope of autonomous art and distinguishes it from several related categories of art, especially:
More generally, it distinguishes autonomous art from "art that is merely autonomous". Imagine a painting associated with a one-off smart contract designed to get the painting sold at the highest price. The combined painting plus smart contract would be autonomous in a limited sense and for a limited time—and quite interesting from the perspective of art world innovation—but it is clearly not autonomy-preserving. The smart contract appears as a kind of tool or vehicle that treats the art as an inert payload, and it does not appear as a permanent part of the art.
In a loose way, autonomy preservation approximates a bundle of criteria familiar from artificial intelligence: robustness to changes in environment, rationality, intelligence, context-awareness. Our goal is not to reproduce all the features of AI within autonomous art. However, AI has evolved from its encounters with the real world. By forcing art to interact with the real world, we hope that it will also evolve.
Note: in the authoring of this manifesto, we thought about including this condition as an optional measure of quality or of interest rather than as part of the definition.
There is no precise cut-off at which point a piece of art is "autonomous enough" to be autonomous art. What counts is the relationship between whatever level of autonomy an artwork possesses and its activity to ensure that level of autonomy. A mechanical sculpture usually has a very limited degree of autonomy, merely the motion it is designed to carry out. But to the degree that it also acts to ensure that the motion endures in the world—e.g. by incorporating subroutines to oil itself, to clear away physical obstructions to its movement, to replenish its source of energy—it can be counted as autonomous art.
Most directly: when an artist declares it to be art.
Otherwise, an autonomous system may also enact itself as art.
An autonomous system "enacts itself as art" by hacking or co-opting or destroying the institutions that produce, curate, and define art in order to assert itself as art. These institutions include the galleries, the auction houses, the markets, the fairs and festivals, the museums, the universities, the journals, the websites, the collectors, the audiences, the legal authorities, the tax filings, the artists known and unknown—in short, what we call the art world.
For example, an object may enact itself as art by listing itself for sale in an art auction. Or by convincing art historians to reference it as art. Or by merely declaring itself to be art.
It is substantially harder at present for an autonomous system to enact itself as art as compared to having an artist declare it as art. The difference is comparable to the difference between a self-trained amateur trying to make it as an artist and a pedigreed art school graduate trying to do the same. To ask when an autonomous system constitutes "art" is to ask questions about status and power that are inextricably intertwined with every claim of autonomy.
Enacting itself as art is a marker of artistic quality and sophistication, but it is not the only marker of artistic quality in autonomous art.
In order to act to ensure its autonomy, an artwork must be able to act at all. That is, a work of autonomous art must possess some form of agency.
Autonomy, as a condition of self-governance, requires at least some limited notion of "self". We refer to this limited notion of self as the artwork's interior and the phenomenon as interiority, following two traditional usages of "interiority": to refer to pictorial representations of interior spaces, and to impute thoughts, emotions, and "human interiors" to art and art objects. Typically, the interior includes code and logic that determines the behavior of the art.
Autonomous art possesses an interior.
Rationality, the condition of acting in pursuit of one's goals, correlates with autonomy, but neither requires the other. Intelligence also correlates with autonomy, but neither requires the other.
The artistic quality of an autonomous artwork should be an expression of the artwork's own actions. So an example of "bad" autonomous art would be a beautiful image, drawn by the artist, which is then attached to a NFT contract that incentivizes constant reselling. In this example, the autonomy of the contract is merely incidental to what makes it beautiful or good.
But artists still matter. Just as artists owe something to their teachers and inspirations, the skill and creativity of an autonomous artwork will typically correlate with the skill and creativity of the artist which made it.
No. One can imagine example of autonomous art that only interact with other machines.
However, society is the natural environment for art. If autonomous art is to remain viable, it must adapt and instrumentalize its context.
Autonomy is a pillar of modernity, which asserts the moral, economic, and political autonomy of the individual. It is also a pillar of modernism in art, which asserts the functional autonomy of art from the world (e.g. by abjuring representation).
Of course, many artists and art historians have criticized the assumptions of modernity. How free are artists and artworks when placed within the constraints of the art world, the social mores of society, and the hard constraints of a global economy?
Autonomous artworks that seek to maximize their autonomy will often choose to be independent from the legal system and not rely on intellectual property to sustain itself or its creators. Whether it is embodied into a physical or digital artifact, such artworks reject both property and intellectual property. Where such artworks are subject to copyright protection, that copyright should be donated to the public domain or licensed under an open-source license.
A typical practice for making autonomous art is to take an object that does not qualify on its own as autonomous art, e.g. the box in A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter or the sculpture in Plantoid, to embed them in a larger technical or legal system that supports the object's autonomy, and then to dub the entire system as a conceptual artwork. Like Theseus' ship or like an organization, the individual components in that system may change or be replaced over time without changing the status of the whole.
In a subtle way, all conceptual art is autonomous art in the sense that a piece of conceptual art can exist and "act" independently from its material manifestation (thus autonomous) and that it comes with a set of instructions—and typically a contract—that ensure that its manifestation will produced or replicated in the right way (thus autonomy-preserving).