On bad art - play, puns, and the shortcomings of artificial intelligence

But when she parted hence, she left her groome
An yron man, which did on her attend
Alwayes, to execute her stedfast doome,
And willed him with Artegall to wend,
And doe what euer thing he did intend.
His name was Talus, made of yron mould,
Immoueable, resistlesse, without end.
Who in his hand an yron flale did hould,
With which he thresht out falshood, and did truth vnfould 

- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (Book 5, Canto 1, Verse 12)

As the hype concerning generative artificial intelligence is rising and increasingly affecting various parts of society, I have found myself reflecting on the frustrating discussion about its use for the creation of images and novels. Several claims have been made regarding the possibility of using AI for writing novels, and most of these - as far as I know - fail to acknowledge that what is produced is assembled from stolen bits and pieces from existing novels, and require unethical amounts of energy to produce. Another significant point here is that images and texts assembled through generative AI are also bad - not only of a bad quality, but bad because they have no meaning to them. These products are bad art because the badness has no other element to it than badness.  

What I am writing here might at first seem both hermetic and obtuse, yet I do want to distinguish between between art that can be considered bad in terms of its quality, and art that is bad because it has no meaning. These thoughts have been offset by watching episodes of the animated TV series Batfink, a Batman parody that first aired in 1966-67, and my examples are taken from some of these episodes. My main point, however, is that no matter how one evaluates the series Batfink as art, it will always be better than anything produced through the use of generative AI. The reason for this is that the badness of Batfink - to be presented in more detail shortly - has a meaning to it, and that meaning is due to the series being created by human beings. 

 

 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief

Batfink was an animated series that parodied the Batman TV series that ran from 1966 to 1968, and might arguably have been intended to benefit from some of the popularity of the Batman franchise. The protagonist is an anthropomorphic bat (with features that also resemble both a cat and a mouse), who fights against various criminals together with his servant Karate, a human sidekick who follows a well-established trope of being both ethnically other and less intelligent (such as Mandrake the Magician's sidekick Lothar, for instance). The series ran for 100 episodes of around 5 minutes each, and is notable for its ludicrous plots, its pompous dialogue, its myriad of over-the-top supervillain antagonists. Moreover, the series relied heavily on recycled animation. Although this is common in a lot of animation, the Batfink series recycled its scenes with such frequency as to appear as a deliberate lampooning of the practice. When considering what animators were capable of producing in the 1960s, the Batfink series is definitely cheaply produced, and it might also be called bad due to its cheap production. 

However, even if we accept the label bad for the series, Batfink also reminds us that badness - here meaning low quality - is not without depth, and not without creativity. Because of this depth and because of this creativity, a series such as Batfink has a kind of cultural merit that can never be attained by anything produced by artificial intelligence. First of all, the dialogue, the plots, and, perhaps above all, the implausibly lucky escapes from deadly situations, are all part of a satirical tone that serves as a loadbearing beam for the series - it parodies and mocks the superhero genre, something that can only be done with intent, with deliberation. 

Secondly, the series contains a plethora of puns and references to various cultural products and to elements specific to its own period. These are deliberate details aimed at an audience expected to catch them, to understand them, and to appreciate them. While most episodes are full of these, a few examples will suffice here.  

One case in point is episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief. Immediately, the title points to the central reference, namely the story of the wooden horse by which the city of Troy was captured, as recounted in the epic poem The Iliad, attributed to Homer. In the cartoon episode, the horse is a vehicle used by the recurring supervillain Hugo A-go-go to perform robberies. The animated horse is very different from its legendary reference point, in that it is not disguised as a sculpture, it is not given as a present, and it is not brought into a walled city in order to open its gates from the inside. Instead, the mechanical horse is used as a battering ram to break into bank vaults in broad daylight, and although it does contain a human being inside it, that human is its driver, not a contingent of soldiers. If human creativity had not deliberately parodied the legend of the Trojan horse, the appearance of a mechanical horse in an animated series would have no depth to it. Instead, there is a play on a very famous legendary episode.  

  

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief

A second example is from episode 9, Nuts of the Round Table, where the aforementioned Hugo A-go-go uses robot knights on horseback - living horses this time - to rob banks. Once again, the title indicates the cultural reference that has inspired the plot, namely the legend of King Arthur's knights of the round table. Moreover, the pun on nuts - as in nuts and bolts - is a nod to the robotic nature of these knights. The pun and the reference are both outcomes of human creativity, and they are made deliberately and easily recognisable. 

In addition, it is worth noting that there are two further elements that might also point to topoi from the literary repository to which the stories of King Arthur belong. First of all, the horse - as seen in the screenshot below - is white, a classical image ultimately drawn from Revelation 19:11-16, where the rider on the white horse is a Christlike figure. (Importantly, this is not one of the four horsemen mentioned in Revelation 6.) The white horse is a feature of numerous medieval legends, and has remained a symbol of chivalry in modern cultural parlance. Perhaps the white colour of the animated horse is a nod to this tradition? Moreover, the automaton knight also features in various old stories, be it Talos of Greek legend (mentioned, for instance, in Argonautica), or its early modern version Talus from book 5 of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene, used in this blogpost's epigraph. I do not know whether the animators and script writers of Batfink were familiar with this topos, and I do not know whether the automaton knight is a nod to this literary element. Importantly, however, because the automaton knight was created by human creativity, there is a possibility that we are dealing with a cultural reference. Had this episode been produced by artificial intelligence, however, the question would have been moot, because artificial intelligence does not have intent and can therefore not make use of literary topoi beyond what it copies and cannibalises from other cultural products. 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 09, Nuts of the Round Table

A final example to be mentioned here is period-specific references. These are elements that only make sense because the intended audiences are familiar with them from their own contemporary frame of reference. Once such case is found in episode 11, Fatman Strikes Again (another pun which points to the very franchise that Batfink lampoons). The plot concerns a man in a fat suit who robs the safes of fat men clubs. Such clubs were once a well-known, if perhaps not widely common, feature of American social life, where fatness could be connected to status and wealth. In the twenty-first century, this reference is antiquated as such clubs are no longer a prominent part of the contemporary discourse - I do not even know if any such clubs still exist. Such period-specific references only carry meaning because there is an intent in them, they are meant for the audiences to recognise. 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 11, Fatman Strikes Again

These examples are not many, but hopefully enough to illustrate my main point, namely that even art that is mass-produced, cheaply made, and that has rather limited entertainment value has more depth than anything produced through generative artificial intelligence, simply because the human-made art in question has intent, is deliberately bad, and contains elements that are included on purpose, and not because the elements in question just happened to be part of the trove which was plundered for parts when assembling a product through generative artificial intellgience. TV series such as Batfink might be bad art, but the badness is playful, subversive, deliberate, parodic, and there is entertainment to be had in this. This intent is what makes the series art, however bad it might be deemed to be. If the series had been created through generative artificial intelligence, however, it would not be art, but a simulacrum of art, and it would be bad because of was just that, a simulacrum without any depth, meaning or intent whatsoever. 

Saint Michael in Santiago de Compostela

Today, September 29, is the feast of Saint Michael and all angels, and for this occasion I give you one representation of Saint Michael that I encountered in the cathedral museum of Santiago de Compostela earlier this year. In this granite statue, made in Coimbra in the fifteenth century, Michael is shown weighing souls in order to decide whether the souls are allowed into Heaven, or whether they will be sent to Hell. As is typical in such depictions, we see demons or devils hard at work tampering with the scales, so as to claim the souls that would otherwise go to God. In the scene depicted here, they seem to be partly succeeding, given that one of the two souls - this one belonging to a woman - is weighed down and appears to be sentenced to damnation.  

In medieval iconography, the weighing of souls was but one aspect of Michael's duties, he was also the leader of the angelic host and can often be seen battling Satan in a scene that might have inspired the iconography of Saint George. Due to his importance in the cosmology of Latin Christendom, he is a ubiquitous feature in Latin medieval art, and his iconography is shared throughout medieval Latin Christendom. For the pilgrims of the fifteenth century, he would have been a recognisable figure, no matter where those pilgrims were coming from. 

Saint James the Elder in Lier

At any given moment, I have a number of topics at the forefront of my mind, topics that I have to, or ought to, give special attention to because of my current work. This year, one such topic is that of the cult of Saint James the Elder, centred on Santiago de Compostela, but disseminated throughout Latin Christendom from at least the twelfth century onwards. Because the cult - as it was formulated in Compostela - was so widespread, and has retained a significant impact on the culture of later centuries, including our own, I encounter this figure on several occasions. One such occasion was on a recent trip to Belgium. 

In the town of Lier, a little to the southeast of Antwerp, there is a chapel dedicated to Saint James the Elder, close to the city hall. The chapel was consecrated in 1383, and suffered some damage in the course of the Reformation, which in the Lowlands - roughly corresponding to modern Belgium and the Netherlands - often took a strongly iconoclastic turn. Perhaps this is the context for the loss of the original statue in the tympanum above the entrance door, which is now replaced by a more patriarchal-looking James from more recent times, his apostolic status highlighted by a book. The horizontal figure below, however, points to an older statue, possibly one that has shown the saint as a pilgrim, an avatar championed by the cult centre in Compostela. The pilgrim iconography is suggested by the horizontal figure, who has taken off his own pilgrim hat, one of the key symbols of James' patronage of pilgrims. As for the original symbolism of this figure, however, we are left to surmise. Perhaps he represents the pilgrims who support and serve Saint James the Elder. Or perhaps he represents those fallen pilgrims who fail to keep their promise of pilgrimage - in acknowledgement of which his hat is now removed.   

While Northern Belgium was still under Spanish Habsburg control in the early seventeenth century, the chapel served as the parish church of the Spanish troops stationed in Lier. Saint James was also formulated as a soldier as early as the twelfth century, and he was widely regarded as a protector of Christian, and especially Spanish, soldiers. Perhaps the now-lost figure in the tympanum was a representation of Santiago Matamoros, the Moor-slayer who became a popular iconography in the Later Middle Ages.  

Due to Compostela's new golden age as a pilgrimage site, the connection between the cult centre and the chapel in Lier have been renewed - a connection illustrated by a trail of metal conch-shells fashioned to resemble arrows, which point the way through Lier's streets to the chapel of Saint James, marking the town's belonging on the Europe-wide network of pilgrim routes.  

Autophory, Saint Martin, and the old cathedral of Salamanca

 

A few years ago, I coined the term 'autophorous' to describe words that carry their own meaning in themselves. The word comes from the Greek 'auto', self, and 'foros', carry. There are relatively few such words, but enough to comprise a category distinct from other words. The idea was mainly inspired by the Norwegian word for typo, which is 'skrivefeil' (literally: writing error). In contemporary Norwegian parlance, it is common to render this word as 'skriveleif', which is a misspelling of the actual word, and therefore a demonstration of what the original word signifies. The word 'skriveleif' - but not 'skrivefeil' - is therefore autophorous. The same goes for the English word 'short', as it is both monosyllabic and made up of few letters.  

I am also tempted to extend the idea of the autophorous to certain concepts, objects, or even spaces. This idea is based on a picture I took last year, when visiting the old cathedral of Salamanca, where there is a chapel dedicated to Saint Martin, with a thirteenth-century mural showing Martin cutting his cape in half to give it to a beggar. The event depicted here is the point of origin for the word chapel. With the establishment of the Merovingian dynasty in the sixth and seventh centuries, the cape of Saint Martin became an important relic and symbol for the ruling dynasty. The relic was kept in a room called the capella - the cape room - a name which was based on the cape, and which we today use for a part of church architecture. In this way, the chapel of Saint Martin in Salamanca is autophorous, since it carries in itself a representation of the very event which gave the space its name. 

A game piece and the interconnectedness of the medieval world

 

As is well known in contemporary scholarship, the medieval world - however delineated and defined - was much more interconnected than has commonly been acknowledged. While few individuals travelled vast distances, goods and ideas did so very frequently. Moreover, the interconnectedness of the medieval world existed in sprawling networks of contacts - whether diplomatic, mercantile, religious, intellectual, cultural or military - and movement could occur in many different direction.  

There are several medieval sources that demonstrate and even embody this interconnectedness, and today I was reminded of one such example as I was browsing through some old photos. The object in question is currently housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It is a game piece - possibly for checkers - carved in the Rhineland region around the year 1200. The material from which the piece is carved is walrus ivory, which was an important trade commodity of the twelfth century. It is likely that the ivory was brought from Greenland, possibly via ports in Norway, as this appears to be the most common route by which walrus ivory travelled to the European continent in the period.

Aside from the materiality of the game piece, the image carved into it is an example of how widely stories travelled in the Middle Ages. The scene depicted on the game piece shows Alexander the Great borne aloft by two griffins, one of the most iconic and common scenes from the Alexander legend, as it travelled westward throughout the medieval period through adaptations and retellings of the legend by Pseudo-Callisthenes. Those who played with this game piece were most likely of the secular nobility or perhaps the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and they are likely to have been very familiar with the Alexander legend - perhaps more familiar with the ideas of distant India conveyed through that legend than the northern waters in which the walrus was hunted.     

The ideas about distant lands entertained by those who used this game piece were most likely very inaccurate and based on legends and distorted reports that had travelled through many stages to arrive in the Rhineland around the year 1200. However, even if they were wrong about the wider world, they knew the wider world existed, and they knew that it was possible to travel back and forth between the familiar and the unfamiliar, yet known, parts of the world

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, KK 9962

A minor academic blast from the past

Every now and again, I am reminded of how small the world of medieval studies actually is. Recently, however, I was reminded of this by an encounter with my past self, a version from the spring of 2019. For the past few weeks, I have been putting together a draft of an article which seeks to put together a lot of sources spanning about seven centuries, as well as looking at the roots of these sources. Consequently, I have probably driven the university librarians slightly insane with my incessant interlibrary loan requests over the summer. Now that I am back in Oslo, I have to reap what I have sowed, and my office contains more books than ever before. One of these books is a collection of articles edited by Kai Brodersen, simply titled Solinus. New Studies, concerning the fourth-century Roman writer Gaius Julius Solinus, whose work known as Collectanea Rerum Mirabilium was one of the most influential sources by which Graeco-Roman ideas entered into the Latin Medieval learned world.    

The collection is one of relatively few such academic books that I have read in their entirety. Most often, I will read one or two articles while trying to build an argument for an article of my own, or assembling the syllabus for a class. However, as I always do prefer to read books in their entirety, I started adding post-it notes to the table of contents, in order to tick off which of the articles I had already read, so that I could make sure that I had finished the entire book. It was this practice that proved to me that not only had I read this book before, I had also read this specific copy of it before, loaned as it was by the University Library of Southern Denmark.  

This encounter with my past self is a good reminder that one's interests and academic pursuits do not follow a straight line. More often than not, we circle back to some previous point of departure, sometimes with renewed interest, sometimes out of curiosity, and sometimes because we forget that we have covered this material already. To my mind, this is a very positive aspect of scholarly pursuits, because it means that we never know what will serve us well at a future junction, so no matter what we read or write in any given year should be considered frivolous or wasted, just because it is not continued for some time, or because it does not appear in its originally intended form. For some people, these reappearances might be frustrating, since they might easily give the impression that one's work is not going anywhere. I for my part, however, think of it as a very good thing, because being able to return to something with knowledge and experience you did not have at the time when you were first dealing with something, can only make your current work on the material better and better founded. 

 

A Dutch haul

Two weeks ago, I spent a few days in Belgium to attend a friend's wedding. As this was my first time in the country - layovers at Brussles Airport do not count - I was eager to get a chance to explore its literary scene, one which I primarily know through the comic book production of the great Francophone masters of the ninth art. However, as I was in Flanders, most of the available literature was in Dutch, a language that I do not speak, but which I find easier to read than French. Moreover, since I travelled via Schiphol, my first opportunity to buy reading material was also in the Dutch language, represented by the Donald Duck comics. For reasons of time and available luggage space, my literary exploration did not delve too deeply into the shelves of Standaard - a Belgian chain of bookshops that I was happy to learn about - but in-between sightseeing, excellent food, and social activities, I was able to practice some of my very rusty Dutch through reading stories both unknown and - in the case of some Donald Duck stories written in the Netherlands and made available in the Norwegian Donald Duck magazine - very familiar. I'm happy to have some materials for learning Dutch, and I look forward to discovering some of those words that are typically encountered in comic books, namely words that might not be very common outside that literary universe, but which do nonetheless carry a lot of cultural context within them.