Dominik Mahnič // Steering the Brush
Exhibition Catalogue
Match Gallery presents its first monographic publication, released by MGML to accompany the exhibition of academic painter, video master, street artist, and technologist Dominik Mahnič, titled Steering the Brush.
The monograph, featuring expert texts in Slovene and English and enriched with extensive visual material, outlines the evolution of Mahnič’s painting machines since 2016, ranging from the Aerograph and Acrylicograph to the Čopičograf (Brushograph).
It is precisely this latest version of the Čopičograf, an innovative painting machine that enables AI to contemplate and automate the painterly gesture, that was the focal point of the Steering the Brush exhibition.
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“The point is not whether a machine can paint like me, but whether I can paint with the machine.”
(Dominik Mahnič)
A substantial amount of enthusiasm from the artist Dominik Mahnič (Postojna, 1981) during the preparation of the exhibition Steering the Brush at the Match Gallery (19 September–5 November 2023) unexpectedly aligned the team of the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (MGML) with the artist. Based on his extensive body of machine-painting work, we decided to invest the effort and resources precisely into creating his monograph.
With the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into image generation and into controlling the processes of the Čopičograf (Brushograph) machine-painting system, we felt it worthwhile, already in this first edition, produced under the auspices of the Match Gallery, to commemorate a historical turning point that may be unfolding through the use of this most contemporary tool/medium in artistic creation.
We invited three experts to contribute texts that form the conceptual backbone of the monograph:
Eszter M. Polónyi, in her essay The Return of the Painter: Mechanicity and Its Operator, lays out the artist’s fundamental creative approach, situates the Čopičograf within the history of artistic production, and describes in detail the functioning and gestures of the painting machine/robot.
In his article Mahnič’s Brushography as a New Anthropogenic Artefact, Jure Vuga undertakes an art-historical and iconographic study of the artist’s painted oeuvre, examining the innovations he has introduced into painting through the medium he has been developing.
A valuable contribution to the catalogue is also the essay by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Jurij Bon, Hallucinations in Generative Intelligent Systems (GPT) – A Design Flaw or a Sign of Emerging Intelligence?, which explains from a medical-scientific perspective that the diagnostic term for generative deviations in artificial intelligence should be understood as confabulation rather than hallucination.
(from the introduction by exhibition curator Jani Pirnat)
Artist: Dominik Mahnič
Edited by: Julija Hoda, Jani Pirnat, Maja Čehovin Korsika
Texts: Jurij Bon, Jani Pirnat, Eszter M. Polónyi, Jure Vuga
Design: Jaka Šuln
Print: R-tisk
Print run: 300
Produced by: Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana
Ljubljana, May 2024