Experiment # 7 (seven): Axel King (2007 - present)

What if the virtual starts to mingle with the real? Systems or machines are taking over creative input? Or what if the crowd decides what an artist will create? Axel King is a virtual artist able to produce real paintings, using crowd-sourced creativity from his community website.

We're proud to have given birth to Axel King... Not only to him as a person, but as Axel King the project as well. It's fascinating how many intriguing questions he raises. In the artistic field, but also in the socio-cultural, economical and psychological field.

The idea that triggered our thinking process was to conceive a system that would autonomously create art. A machine producing art without the intervention of the artist. A system that would extract the touch of the artist as well as his creative input. With today's world filled with terms such as globalization, crowd-sourced information, user-generated content, outsourcing, ... we knew that the answer to our issue laid there. For us, these terms are merely tools. Tools that are more near-at-hand than generally assumed. Tools that we embrace and use in the most efficient way.

Axel King raises questions on the artistship. Where and how is the artist positioned? Who, in the creative process, needs to do what when producing art? Where does the artist stops being an artist or where does he starts being one? Is Axel King really the artist because we impose him to be one, knowing that he didn't actually paint one single work neither helped conceive the system. Are the Axel King brain creators (members of the axelking.com community) artists? Are the Chinese painters artists? Are we still artists, as we act as the impresario of Axel as well? Does the system insinuate that successful artists are successful managers as well? Can we presume that the works of the graphic designers and illustrators become art, from the moment they are posted on the site or rather from the moment they are selected to be included in an art work of Axel King?

Axel King stimulates us to reflect on a specific part of today’s world economics. Made in China is more actual than ever, but the general public is still very reserved and suspicious towards all what comes from there. The truth is that those booming economies are passing us by at such an extraordinary speed that it would be ignorant not to embrace them. We will need them. Not vice versa. That is why we opted to make use of Chinese painter studios.
Finally, the Axel King process encourages us to rethink concepts such as copyright and authenticity, which are being undermined since the existence of Web 2.0.

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www.axelking.com * info@axelking.com