brettworks

(Rembrandt, A Scholar in his Study, c. 1640s)

In 1998, when Google introduced their proprietary Internet search engine, the definition of the word search shifted. Searching had long been a laborious process of seeking carefully and thoroughly for information and insight on a topic. It took a lot work, usually by an individual with a lot of questions. Picture a scholar lost in the library stacks, or a music student studying the minutiae of their teacher’s technique. With the advent of the search engine, searching was reduced to typing queries and getting quick answers. Today, search is quotidian. It’s come to mean asking the Internet a question or prompting AI chatbots into confident explantations of any topic. We mostly trust the results of our online searches, even through we haven’t done the research ourselves and the answers volleyed back at us have been cobbled together from a million invisible sources. (An LLM is as “smart” as the human content it can steal and repackage as a simulacrum of knowledge.) The bottom line is that, for most of us, searching takes almost no effort.

Just as searching for knowledge had long been a laborious process, so too with making art. Artists, like their copycat LLMs, also work with a million invisible sources. But since they’re not computers, they’ve always engaged with this material physically, taking it in with their whole body-minds. The artist is a kind of analog remixer, taking ideas and feels from here and there in their lifetime of experience and synthesizing these sources to make new work. It’s an amazing aesthetic equation, if you think about it. Working with so many sources requires a process. This is why artists typically spend so much time trying out different combinations of materials, juxtaposing ideas, playing with form, obsessively studying the works of others, and running aesthetic experiments.

But driving artists’ work is an old-fashioned kind of search, specifically the search for beauty. Searching–thoroughly and carefully–is, in fact, what artists do. What does this search feel like? It feels like a kind of scanning of the environment in which one works. This environment is partly of one’s making (e.g. you made a palette of sounds) and partly a function of one’s tools (e.g. you have an instrument you’re always learning to use fresh ways). The artist’s searching then, is an interactive cycling around an area of interest. You’re doing things whilst noticing anything interesting that’s happening as a result of your doing. And then you build on whatever you find.

An artist’s doing is related to the consumer’s assessing. For example, a listener attending to the music or a reader reading the novel is taking in a world while registering that world’s effects on themselves. But there’s limits to a consumer’s agency. The listener or reader can change their relationship to the work somewhat, but they can’t change the work itself. In contrast, the artist who’s making the work is interacting with something they can change at any time. A jazz improviser exemplifies this fluid dynamic. For the artist, search is a seeking but also an orienteering through a world you’re inventing in real time.

A final observation about the artist’s search is that one usually doesn’t have a clear goal in mind. It’s more a case of, I’ll know it when I hear it. And even when you hear something interesting, it’s always a surprising kind of interesting. You didn’t hear this coming–your search couldn’t predict this emergence. And that’s the point. Unlike using a search query to get a quick answer to a question posed to Google or an AI, artistic practice is a slow search to learn about something we didn’t know we were seeking.