Caio Raphael

Initial premisse:
- sculpting, modeling, painting:
  - Feels more like it was made by hand.
- downloaded textures, downloaded assets, kitbashes, photoscans, stamp brushes, patterns, procedural generation, geonodes, array modifier, automation, AI generation
  - Feels like a cheat.
  - Some of these things can require more technical skill than things in the first, so "cheating" here isn't really about difficulty.
Discussion:
- Scenario:
  - A: You sculpt 500 rocks.
    - The artwork is the rocks.
    - Contains evidence that a human interacted with the object:
      - slight asymmetries
      - inconsistent proportions
      - tool marks
      - locally different decisions
      - accumulated corrections
      - accidents
      - material-specific imperfections.
    - Handmade art has a particular kind of friction:
      - Your hand can't make a perfect circle.
      - Your sculpting brush has a particular behavior.
      - Your attention gets tired.
      - You accidentally make something asymmetric.
      - You have to solve problems locally.
    - Those constraints influence the artwork.
    - Automation removes some of those constraints.
    - That's why handmade work can have a distinctive voice: the limitations of the artist become part of the visual language.
  - B: You sculpt 5 rocks and create a procedural system that generates variations of them.
    - The artwork arguably becomes the generator.
  - C: You download a rock generator.
    - The artwork might primarily be the selection and composition.
- All are legitimate forms of work. But they are not the same creative achievement.
- The more extreme the compression, the more disconnected you can feel from the individual pixels/polygons.
- Where to trace the boundaries? Are these "cheating"? are all forms of delegating work to a system.
  - Making a brush that
  - symmetry while sculpting
  - mirror modifiers
  - proportional editing
  - subdivision
  - booleans
  - smoothing
  - sculpting alphas
  - texture projection
  - ctrl+z
  - using a custom brush you created
- We simply have different emotional reactions to them because they've become culturally accepted.
- Imagine an artist builds an incredibly sophisticated procedural rock system.
- They spend months developing:
  - erosion simulation
  - strata generation
  - fracture patterns
  - material variation
  - moss distribution
  - lichen masks
  - geological layering
  - silhouette controls
- Then they make one rock.
- Is that rock "less handmade" than a rock sculpted in 30 minutes?
- In this case, the system itself is the sculpture. The visible rock is just one execution of the artist's design.
- That's similar to programming. A game developer doesn't manually specify every frame of animation, every pixel, every collision response, every particle position. You write rules. The machine produces the enormous number of consequences. We don't normally say "You cheated because the CPU calculated the physics", because we recognize that designing the rules is itself authorship.
- This distinction feels much more precise than "manual = good, automated = bad":
- Delegation
  - "I created a system that performs part of the work."
  - Ex:
    - Geometry Nodes you designed yourself
    - Your own sculpt + your own procedural detail
    - You take pictures of objects to create materials.
    - You scan a place to use it as a photoscan.
    - AI concept, to then manually rebuilt 3D model; can be considered a reference.
- Substitution
  - "I obtained the finished work from somewhere else."
  - Ex:
    - A Geometry Nodes asset you downloaded and barely modified
    - Downloaded photoscan + downloaded material + downloaded vegetation
    - AI image, presented as if you painted it.
At some point, 'art' and 'service/automation/edition' get mixed together.
Two artists: one designer and one painter.
How much of an “artist” the designer was depends on what percentage of the designer’s decisions were used in the final piece. Were the decisions actually theirs, or was it left to the painter to fill in what was missing?
- A designer receives a concept → makes decisions → hands it over to the painter.
- The painter receives those decisions → makes new decisions → produces the artwork.
Regardless, authorship is always shared between the two artists.
What kind of artist are you?
- Do you always share authorship with another artist, perhaps by working as a designer?
- Are you an artist who expresses yourself through reinterpretation/reworking of something that already exists? Someone who works through composition?
- Someone who creates original works?
What defines originality?
An “original” artist draws on references, so their “original” art is a form of reinterpretation.
- They still use
  - visual references.
  - learned techniques.
  - cultural conventions.
  - existing styles.
  - previous experiences.
  - works they have seen.
  - tools created by others.
  - concepts they have inherited.
- Even when there is no identifiable source work, there is a history of influences.
- All creation is a form of reinterpretation; what changes is the distance between the final work and its references. Nobody creates something entirely original.
- This does not necessarily mean that “everything is a copy.” The difference lies in the new decisions introduced by the artist.
- “Originality” is about “the quantity and nature of the new decisions introduced by the artist onto whatever they received as their starting point.”
Instead of asking “Who created the work?”, we should ask: “Which decisions that constitute this work can be attributed to each agent?”