Poetic Automatisms: A Comparison of Surrealist Automatisms and Artificial Intelligence for Creative Expression

Inspired by the recent controversy about art created by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and its successes in the art market, we are analyzing the use of automatisms as creative processes in visual arts. Without an attempt at exhaustiveness, we focus on two examples that mark two significant moments in art history: We compare surrealist automatisms and the automatisms used in recent AI artworks. Our interest is to understand the nature of the associated automatisms and the intentions and poetics motivating their use. The paper discusses the criteria of selection of which automatisms to analyze and locates them in their art historical context. To facilitate this analysis, we propose a framework to assess the poetic intentions and correlate them with the creative processes developed by the different artist groups. The overarching question motivating this investigation is to understand what has changed in our perception of the creative process and how it became possible for computational art to, today, occupy a seemingly uncontested place in the art market and discourse, after decades of heated controversy about its impossibility words.