David Salle considers the ideal curriculum for training an artistic AI An essay by the artist

Artists have often struggled to go beyond the available permissions of their time and place to transcend the familiar and to free up the imagination. The most common way of going about this is with drugs: opium or alcohol or marijuana or, today, ayahuasca or ketamine. Other methods involve meditation, fasting, hypnosis or foreign travel. Anything to slip the confines of one’s own consciousness, the contents of one’s own head.

There is also a long history of artists who have embraced technological innovation, adapting new materials or processes to their own working methods. Everything was new once; there was a time when oil paint itself was a new technology; painting on canvas instead of wood panels was also a leap. The camera, which some thought would make painting obsolete, was almost from the beginning embraced by painters who understood its potential for conveying a sense of form. Artists as diverse as Degas, Eakins, Bonnard, Wols, Rauschenberg and Richter all used the camera to varying degrees in their work. Silkscreen, video, neon – all radical departures at one time, now simply part of the artist’s toolbox.

I have long dreamed of a truly malleable, elastic pictorial space, in which distortion comes from within, and is resolved according to some hitherto unknown system. What I longed for in particular was the dynamism of all-over abstraction, the theatrical space of largescale abstract painting – the heft and physical sensation of New York School painting, only fashioned out of figuration, out of images.