Machines, Memory, and the Human Hand:
From Video to Generative AI
Shalom Gorewitz
“The concept of the definitive text belongs only to religion or to fatigue… The idea that every translation is inferior to the original is meaningless. Strictly speaking, the original is unfaithful to the translation.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, Las versiones homéricas, 1932, in Discusión
- Origins: The Machine as Dream
Every era and place invents its own methods of fortune telling. Runes, cowry shells, the I Ching existed in sacred spaces, speaking softly with great wisdom. Now the oracle hums quietly as an AI app embedded in the device in the palm of our hand. It is a map into all of recorded history, but is it a landscape to be explored? Is there a human path into a technology that seems be a vast universe of data and simulations? Is AI a glorified browser? What do we want from it? What does it want of us?
At MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Arts in 1968 I stood before a machine as large as a refrigerator, feeding it punch cards like wood prayers into a Zen temple fire. I learned how patience could resemble devotion- one frame at a time, meditation in sync with the machine. The rudimentary digital film was a cine-dream of Stan Vanderbeek during the dawn of computer movies. Through the punch cards Images were reduced to numbers, translated as pixels, and reproduced on a screen pretending to be representations of real objects and landscapes.
Alan Turing had already dreamed the dream of a “universal machine” capable of imitating all others. In our philosophy classes at Antioch College we speculated on how computer language would change the way we spoke. In those days computer-speak was lifted from military commands including execute, abort, target, deploy, shell, and kill. Now prompts are friendly. AI is conversational and sympathetic. Antioch Professors Keith McGary, Ben Thompson, and Jim Green, asked, “Can machines think? Can they imagine? Can they desire?” We were pointed to the many writers who have tried to answer these questions.
From Mary Shelley’s humanoid to Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL 9000, from Huxley’s engineered happiness to Philip Dick’s androids, the story of literature’s premonition of AI is the story of people pondering about themselves through the lens of their generation’s inventions. These writers didn’t predict computational intelligence, they foresaw something about how the technologies would affect our souls. They often warned that mass media, tele-robotics, and AI would be the mirror we’d build to envision ourselves more clearly, and the terror of what we’d find there.
Franz Kafka, Octavia E. Butler, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson and others predicted that fusion of mortals with machines would change human consciousness. They pointed to ways to see ourselves reflected, magnified, and transformed by the onslaught of robots and intelligent machines. Their fictions were warnings and mirrors. They wrote of machines to tell us that the true creative engine has always been imagination itself powered by language, myth, and the flicker of human fears, anxieties, and hopes. Like Rilke’s angel in The Duino Elegies, AI is beautiful because it is terrifying. We are drawn to it, but it does not love us.
- The Invention of Seeing
Some art historians say that art began with a handprint on a cave wall. Are the hands, animals, and abstract icons, religious or simply representations of hunted animals? Is there an aesthetic quality to the prints? We wonder what part of the ancient consciousness understood that the imprint of the hand says to eternity, I was here. This was my home. Is this the reason to make art? I was here, this is what I saw, this is how I experienced my surroundings.
Video technology provided the visual language for electronic poetry: radiant, volatile, ephemeral. Its light was not meant to be owned but to pass through. Compared to film, the medium offered real-time recording, mobility, and pathways to broadcast. The videos I made at the Experimental Television Center from 1977-1985 were shown in bars, galleries, on the street, in museums, dance halls, and during half time at a football stadium. I was commissioned to create visuals for Jimi Hendrix’ Woodstock Festival rendition of the Star Spangled Banner as the sign off on the USA Cable Network show, Night Flight from 1981-86. Now, with streaming, every artist has their own channel.
Gene Youngblood, one of my professors at Cal Arts, encouraged us to take home a video camera and reel-to-reel tape deck and live with the tools intimately for several days. He compared the feedback experience to the modern Narcissus seeing their face in a flickering electronic pond. The pioneers of video art- Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Ralph Hocking- treated the screen not as window but as mirror: a place where perception is exposed by its own circuitry. Through art making, teaching, and inventing, they encouraged other artists to conceive, design and construct voltage-controlled modules and controllers.
Early video art attempted to merge the inherent possibilities of analog processing systems with content and innovative styles, as well as offering a method of offering literacy for the generations born into media. It asked, as poetry does, what does it mean to see, when sight itself is augmented?
- Golems, Automata, Angels
The desire to animate matter is ancient. In Jewish mysticism, the Golem stirs when the word emet, truth, is inscribed upon its brow. In Greek legend offers us Talos, a metal robocop whose blood is fire.
As a student, I was deeply influenced by Jorge Luis Borges who was obsessed with translation, paraphrase, and infinite rewording- the exact mechanisms of large language models like ChatGPT. In “The Library of Babel” (1941), Borges imagined a universe structured as a vast library containing every possible combination of letters- every book that has been written or could ever be written. “The Library is total… it contains all the structures of all languages.” Like AI, his library does not think or feel- it predicts, recombines, and reveals. It’s both omniscient and mechanical.
Norbert Wiener conceived cybernetics as the science of control and communication. But what artist truly wants control? We seek resonance, feedback, the shock of accident. The early machinists, from the ninth century inventors the Banū Mūsā brothers’ fountains to early thirteenth century al-Jazarī’s water clocks, understood that beauty lay not in the domination of their contraptions, but in the flow they provided over natural materials.
- The Pulse of the Circuit
My father, Rubin, was the business manager for “Nine Evenings of Art and Technology”, a series of performance events held in New York City at the 69th Regiment Armory (Lexington Avenue at 25th Street) from October 13–23, 1966. Every night featured boundary breaking collaborations between ten artists (including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and Robert Breer) and thirty engineers from Bell Telephone Laboratories. “Nine Evenings of Art and Technology” is widely recognized as a model for bridging engineers and artists and it marked the first large-scale fusion of avant-garde art and advanced engineering in performance form. As a high school student I attended all nine evenings and helped with cables, lighting, and facilitating the public’s experiences.
After the “Nine Evenings,” I began to see that machines could become collaborators. The artist was no longer a solitary “genius” but a conductor of systems. The studio turned into a feedback chamber, the artwork a kind of breathing organism. In 1977, I started working at the Experimental Television Center in Binghamton, New York, with analog computers, I wanted the machine to pulse human time, to falter, and hesitate.
- The Age of Infinite Copies
Every art student in my generation was familiar with Walter Benjamin’s essay mourning the loss of aura in an age of mechanical reproduction. Paul Valéry foresaw it too: art transformed by ubiquity. In the late 1960s, printmaking, photography, filmmaking, and video art were manifestations of a faint hope that the loss of aura might yield new ways of seeing as well as a more democratic approach to sharing art through multiple editions. These media stripped the artwork of its singular unique essence. And yet, paradoxically, this death of aura has now, in 2025, given us another kind of intimacy: the glow of a cell phone screen playing 2001 (1968) by Stanley Kubrick on a crowded New York City subway..
Now AI multiplies that effect beyond comprehension. It produces not a copy but a swarm of infinite variations, each claiming authenticity. It collapses originality into possibility. The artist’s aura becomes the prompt’s echo. Perhaps the next assault on the aura is transparency itself: the honest revelation of process. To reveal the algorithm is to confess the dream’s machinery. Should AI music, visuals and voices be identified within a commercial or music video? Does the producer/artist have some kind of ethical responsibility to say what was made with a robot collaborator? Will there come a time when simulation and physical reality are no longer separate?
- Collaboration with the Ghost
During the 1960s, It became clear that in many ways, machines are smarter than humans. During my early career, I used the original Paik-Abe synthesizer, David Jones’ colorizer, and a variety of wave form generators, to set up repetitive patterns using multiple channels/layers, to mix random recordings of nature, people, and mechanical movements. I could tweak any part of the mix, but realized that the best material came from waiting patiently while the machines did the work.
Since 2019, in Vermont and New York City, I have been making narrative films with plot and characters. To bypass copyright issues and continue to make films without a budget or crew, I recently began to experiment with AI to compose music. This led to soundtracks for my 2025 films, Unseen and Garlic Resistance. The experiment feels similar to what I was doing with video processors. Instead of wave form patterns I tell the app to create a very specific song that I can edit and the machine will endlessly regenerate. It feels like conducting a ghost orchestra with an almost instantaneous memory of 80 billion songs. The narrative content merges with the machine’s algorithms to create melodies that are unique, slick, and haunted by the process. The dead live in the variations.
Whether with film, video, or AI I prompt, listen, edit, and the machine replies in languages I half recognize. The process is a duet between intuition and prediction, between the living and what’s been left behind. To collaborate with any technological medium is to walk the line between authorship and surrender. Such collaboration does not replace the artist’s sensibility; it extends it like a reflection in water’s vibrating surface. Don’t forget that the art work created by AI also adds to AI. Theoretically it is in the AI archive for further transformations. The artist wonders if this is immortality.
- Ethics of the Circuit
To make art with machines is to inherit their contradictions. Garlic Resistance tells of a bully who seizes farms to build AI factories, and yet its music, composed in collaboration AI, critiques the very force that enabled its production.
Just as the early video artists used cables to disrupt the ordinary flow of the video signal, the pioneer artists using AI reprogram circuits to dismantle code. To work as an artist with AI is to stand inside the echo chamber and whisper dissent. Refik Anadol (b. 1986, Turkey) is painting and sculpting immersive installations with data. For example, Machine Hallucinations: NYC (2019) exhibited at the Artechouse New York City, uses 300 million photos of New York City processed through AI, creating surreal “city-memories” that surround viewers in an algorithmic urban dreamscape.
Artists have always been engaged in the technologies of their time. Painters learned chemistry to make their colors. Since the emergence of the age of mechanical technology, the satirical engines of Tinguely, the flesh-and-wire choreography of Stelarc, the browser chaos of JODI — all reveal the absurdity of our faith in control. Their work is the poetry of malfunction.
Perhaps the ethical gesture now is not refusal, but exposure — to show the footprint of the data, the cost of the cloud, the electro-magnetic ghost behind the interface. To make art that remembers the earth and physicality even as it emerges from the server.
- The Hand and the Horizon
When I think of AI, I imagine not a brain but an ocean tide. It gathers everything- books, songs, paintings- and returns them rearranged, like shells left on the shore. The artist’s task is to choose which fragments to keep, which to send back to the sea.
To humanize technology is not to make it sentimental; it is to make it accountable. The true measure of the work lies not in its novelty but in whether it restores our sense of shared time, the pulse beneath the algorithm, the tremor of humanity.
- The Machine’s Whisper
The machine neither loves nor hates. It listens. It predicts. It dreams through us. Together, we can make it sing.
Perhaps that is art’s final truth: the human and technology, forever translating one another, forever unfaithful, forever alive.
The signal continues- luminous, imperfect, endlessly looping back to the hand that made it.
- Transparency Statement
This essay, “Machines, Memory, and the Human Hand,” was written through a process of collaboration between human intuition and machine intelligence. Drafts were composed, edited, and refined in conversation with ChatGPT, an AI language model, while factual research and cross-references were conducted through notebooks, books, Safari, and my wife, the writer Rachel Hadas.
The writing emerged as an experiment in shared authorship- a dialogue between memory, language, and code. Every sentence carries traces of this entanglement: the human hand shaping machine syntax, the algorithm amplifying human thought. Rather than concealing these tools, I acknowledge them as co-participants in the creative process, extensions of the same long lineage of artists working with and against their instruments and materials to discover what it means to think, and to feel, during a time when machines and people are rapidly merging.
- Postscript
Allison Knowles, my teacher at California Institute of the Arts from 1970-71, recently passed away. Her October 31, 2025 obituary in the New York Times reminded me that in 1967 Knowles collaborated with composer James Tenney to create “The House of Dust”, one of the first computer-generated poems, using a Fortran program on a mainframe at Allan Kaprow’s UC San Diego studio. The program’s code, written by Tenney, used combinatorial logic to generate quatrains beginning with “A house of…” It ultimately generated hundreds of thousands of quatrains using random sequencing. This process is an example of ways to bridge human intuition with machine syntax. The computer-generated poem is an early negotiation between algorithmic process and tactile practice: the typewriter and the punch card become tools through which human creativity interacts with mechanical systems. Knowles’s “House of Dust” prefigures today’s AI art by showing that digital randomness, when guided by human sensitivity, can evoke poetic and embodied meaning rather than simple duplication.
