I.T. Geiger-Counter makes automatic art using the cut-up method modified by Markov chains and a lot of good entropy. The resulting works are random variations on a theme: Images go in, get sliced and diced and put back together wrong, and … something comes out.
Something that looked obscene to a local prosecutor when Geiger-Counter displayed it. The artist explained the methods, and how there’s no meaning or intent, inherent or otherwise, in any of the works on display; they are inane, completely devoid of any meaning except what the beholder places there.
The prosecutor maintained that the Miller test doesn’t mention that a work needs to have been produced deliberately to be obscene and anyway it’s an election year.
Can the artist in this scenario successfully use an inanity defense?
I don’t see that the random-assembly method is going to be much of a defense. It’s one thing to say “My computer accidentally made something obscene” and something else entirely to end with “… and then I chose to put it on display in front of people.”
Going by the standards of the Miller test, the random nature of production might actually work for the prosecution, since that would suggest it does indeed lack serious value.
I don’t believe you can personally sue for obscenity. It’s a crime, and so the local District Attorney would have to decide to prosecute it.
And Campbell’s would claim that the letters were put into the can in alphabetical order, and it was your method of stirring that formed them into an obscene word.
“… who chose to see something obscene in a completely random work.”
Taken at this level, how do you prevent unaltered pictures of clouds from being legally considered obscene? According to some people, there are clouds that look like giant tits.
Here’s a question: what about obscenity that the viewer has to put together themself? For example, what if someone publishes a connect-the-dots puzzle that turns out, when completed, to produce an obscene image (according to whatever definition of obscenity applies)?
It would seem to me, that if this can be considered art in any way, then it fails the third provision of the Miller test. Even if the artist denies any artistic intent, it can be regarded as a form of conceptual art.
I don’t see a connection between vaguely (very, very vaguely) suggestive clouds and what the OP is describing. The random art generator is still being fed real images to work with from the start. And the artist is, presumably, not printing and showing every outcome from his random generator, but picking which ones he chooses to show.
The same goes with Campbell’s soup. Mix up all the random bowls you want. If you pick the one with an offensive word, take the picture and print it for public viewing, you haven’t changed the fact that the content is still considered offensive. Those pictures should be treated like any other depiction of a potentially offensive word.
Or, I suppose you think that I should be able to rip random pages out of random magazines, and then pick the ones from Playboy to plaster all over the local elementary school. After all, it was just random output and couldn’t possibly be offensive.
Actually, I didn’t specify that the artist exercised that much choice. Let’s say that 10 images were generated and they all got shown, and they were generated by grabbing the images most recently posted to Facebook using a completely automated process. (All of this is technically possible, by the way.) Anyone who ran that program at the same time could have produced the same images with a certain, defined probability.
Anyway, I think the important aspect of my question has been answered: There is no inanity defense. Claiming, even proving, that a work is meaningless is not a defense against an obscenity charge.
If something is drawn byKevin O’Neill, it is by defnition obscene whether or not it’s comprehensible. I suppose H. R. Giger would fall in that category as well.
I tried to make my pun obvious: H.R. Giger is a real artist that has a corporate department abbreviation in his name, so I replaced H.R. (Human Resources) with I.T. (Information Technology), as my hypothetical artist used computers. From there, Giger to Geiger-Counter was just an obvious twist, in addition to being a reference to the practice of generating true randomness by measuring the time between particle decay events in a piece of radioactive material.
(Also, one of the most striking features of H.R. Giger’s work is how he uses human anatomy as a ‘resource’ is his new compositions. I thought that would make the pun easier to see. Maybe you just need to borrow my eyes… )
Could the artist use the concept of pareidolia as a defense? You know, there’s nothing actually dirty in the art, but* some people*'s brains are wired in a way that suggests obscenity in the innocuous…
