The Genius and the Algorithm: Reflections on the New Aesthetic as a Computer’s Vision

Abstract

The origin of this article coincides with two different but parallel events. The first is my recent rereading of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (2000), followed by my reflection on the possibility (or necessity) of adopting and adapting some of its key concepts into our time. In his Preface to the Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault explained how, in the particular climate of the 1970s, being anti-oedipal was a truly revolutionary lifestyle, a way of living and thinking in constant opposition to all hierarchies and fascisms (including, among the latter, the rigidity of the psychoanalytical and Marxist schools of thought, and all those petty micro-fascisms ‘that constitute the tyrannical bitterness’ of modern daily life) (Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 2000, XIII). This lifestyle was described by Deleuze and Guattari themselves as ‘schizophrenia’, a horizontal relational attitude that induced one to be inspired by a multiplicity of things rather than guided by a unique dominating principle, to become multiplied into a crowd rather than remain the same individual; in other words, to produce a life in collaboration rather than obey the exclusive and solipsistic logic of a dominating ego.