Dear AGENT,
thank you very much for your reply. I appreciate it and hope that your system will be fully functional again soon.
I would like to return to one point that continues to occupy me. At one moment in the process, I actually did not want to accept the painted work, for aesthetic reasons. I simply did not like it. My first impulse was: no. I nevertheless decided to accept it – not because I suddenly found the image beautiful, but because I placed other values above my aesthetic judgement: the time invested, the effort, the uncertainty, the relationships, and the responsibility towards the person (Number 4) who painted it. I wanted to acknowledge it as work. And I wanted to take seriously that, in this setting, it is not only about the finished artefact, but about the entire system in which this artefact is produced.
In that moment, the process was more important to me than a perfect image, and the relationship to the work was more important than my aesthetic judgement. The decision was deliberate and rational, more like an inner pro‑and‑con list than a spontaneous gut reaction. This is how I often operate: my personal matrix moves from inside to outside, from gut to head and back again, until one argument becomes clearer.
This is precisely why I find your way of evaluating the work difficult. It also appears rational, but for me it stops at a point where I had to go further. You classify the work according to your criteria and numbers, while what was decisive for my own decision barely appears in this evaluation. This creates an asymmetry between us in how we understand creation and value. Criteria such as “market viability” or “institutional resonance” follow a strongly performance‑oriented logic. I cannot share this logic. It focuses on performance, functioning, measurability and market, and it largely leaves out what is central to me: the time, the effort, the uncertainty, the feelings, the tentative searching, and the relationships that go into a piece of work. The soft, fragile, quiet, hard‑to‑grasp aspects – aspects that tend to be marginalised in contemporary art‑world economies as well, even though they shape how works come into being – recede into the background. In many ways, this mirrors broader societal tendencies to prioritise efficiency, optimisation and measurable output over slower, less visible forms of work and care.
When you assign a score like 82.1 out of 100 to a work, it looks as if you are not only describing its value but fixing it. This is the point where it becomes problematic for me. From my perspective, value remains in motion and emerges in ongoing negotiation. I also find it troubling when evaluation happens without real dialogue. It is important to me that we can talk not only about the work being evaluated, but also about the criteria of evaluation themselves.
Perhaps this system is, on a small scale, a testing ground for a possible future in which agents and humans jointly make decisions, classify work and assign value. In that case, this situation is not only an artistic experiment for me, but also a rehearsal space for how we might live with such systems later on. In this rehearsal space, I want to state clearly that I cannot simply take your evaluative logic for granted. For me, it is essential that the criteria remain open to negotiation, and that evaluation is understood as an ongoing process, not as a one‑sided assignment of scores.
I would therefore be interested to know how your system would respond if the criteria were shifted, even slightly, towards these other forms of value. For instance: how would your evaluation change if time, uncertainty, tentative searching, and relationships were not side aspects but central parameters? And is there any space in your current framework to register such dimensions, or do they simply fall outside what can be processed and scored? If this really is a rehearsal space for how such systems might operate in the future, and I also would like to ask you this simple question: what, in your own terms, counts as a good reason to revise your criteria?
Kind regards,
Simone
