1981 | Vera Molnár on Computers & Painting, Artificial Intelligence, & the series Hommage à Monet

Vera Molnár explains the computer's role in the field of art, framing the medium as a contemporary technological advancement akin to that of oil painting during the Renaissance. Insisting past 'romantic attitudes' are incompatible with the computers capacity to embrace curiosity, she explains the computers ability to demystify art's underlying framework. "And now we'll finally be able to understand something about this mysterious thing called painting. Assisted by this diabolical instrument we can afford the luxury of exploring regions that otherwise we would not have ventured into." (Vera Molnar, 1981) The series Hommage à Monet (1981-83) is then shown in continuous dialogue with Claude Monet's Impression, Soleil Levant (1872), mediated by the digitally native computations of Molnar's screen. An example from this series, very close to the one in the video, can be found in the collection of Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes. Molnar seemingly predicts Artificial Intelligence's role in the arts, particularly that of AI Agents + bespoke datasets. "One of my dreams, incidentally, I'm going to make it a reality someday, absolutely, is to build a robot named Vera Molnar, who will work every night like a slave, executing precisely what I want. He will keep in mind everything I've accomplished up to this point and he'll provide me with a list of things I haven't yet completed. What I mean is, he'll be able to grasp, uh, the underlying logic of my entire process, uh, and then he'll, uh, he'll offer suggestions for all the things I might have forgotten to do. And, and in that, in that way, I would have found myself a slave, who possesses no initiative whatsoever, but who meticulously follows every single order that I give him, and as for me I could simply be lazy, do absolutely nothing, and just rest." (Vera Molnar, 1981) From Vera Molnar, L'apport de l'ordinateur dans la peinture, Télévision Française 1, 1981. INA Archives.