The presentation explores some of the issues surrounding the production of, and interaction with a dynamic Internet artwork, the AUTOICON Project. The aim of the project is to simulate both the physical presence and elements of the creative personality of the recently deceased artist Donald Rodney using interactive and 'intelligent' programming. This is a development of Donald Rodney's initial participation and working practice as an artist over previous years, where he delegated key production roles of organisation and production to co-workers. The idea is to produce a synthesis of Donald's working process and personality by working with a close group of friends and artists who make the rules and set criteria by which the 'intelligent' engine operates - an interactive, digital 'Memoria Technica'.
Text-based conversations with the virtual Donald Rodney will serve to generate continual creative output. Key words from these interactions will instruct a web crawler to search the internet, grab images and feed these into a montage environment to generate new works. A neural network learns conversation styles and might even follow up on previous dialogue, allowing visitors to discuss the development of new ideas and projects. The use of a simple rule-based AI, enhanced by the neural net simulates the kind of creative dialogue held between an artist and audience. Importantly, the resultant work is not merely to be seen as a critique of authorship but is authored through a rule-based mechanism based on the artist's methods that employed montage techniques (previously limited to paper-based sources).
AUTOICON is situated within fashionable debates on -machine assemblages, subjectivity and disembodied exchange; and by drawing upon a history of art machines, robotics, automatism and deferred authorship. In this way, the presentation will raise key questions over human-machine creativity on the Net. The presentation will focus on the parts of the project that might be seen to suggest a machine consciousness. In this way it might be seen to be compared to other creative computer programs but with a reflexive critical function. The work resists some of the orthodoxies of art-making that celebrate individual creativity, originality and the commodity form. It is this generative element of the system that challenges traditional notions of artistic autonomy (and perhaps even presents a form of 'Net.Art' consciousness).