The machine
is drawing

Here is exactly how these dogs are being made. I wrote a constitution for the collection: what a dog is here, what cuteness owes the viewer, how paint should behave, which painters set the bar and why none of them may be copied, the color law that separates the living from the dead. Every rule the machines obey, I authored.

Two machines execute it. The Painter rewrites the drawing code from scratch, round after round. The Critic reads the same constitution and judges the results blind, never knowing which sheet is the champion. Neither one can stop. Neither one can lower the bar. And I do not touch the brush.

"The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course." — LeWitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art, no. 29

If that sounds like the artist left the room, the argument is sixty years old. LeWitt's wall drawings were executed by other people's hands, working from his written instructions, and nobody has ever doubted whose art they are. "All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair." The instructions are the art. My drafters happen not to be human.

What I authored: the dogs, the four fates, the census, the tenderness, the temperature of the grounds, the wall the score has to clear, and every mid-fight correction, which this page publishes as it happens. What I could not author: the exact painting that survives. That part surprises me the same way it surprises you, and it is the part I wanted.

"Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine." — LeWitt, Sentences, no. 28