Would you describe these works as being, at least in part, about mortality? I can’t help but think of the irony of a computer viewing a vanitas painting – the AI that conceivably could live forever mulling over this depiction of a still life that has long since died.

Yes, those Dutch and Flemish paintings were memento mori; lessons in morality and the fleeting condition of life. In the Dutch flower paintings specifically, not only is a bloom incredibly fleeting (and the painting of it is not), but most of the flowers depicted in a single painting would not all have blossomed at the same time. The question of computers pondering mortality makes me think about corporeality. Even if we finally describe the conditions by which a computer is thinking, and making artistic decisions, it’s still not alive by most peoples′ definitions – it can’t die.

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