Exploring the Skill-Tech Space: Art-Making Awareness Influences Experiencing Visual Artworks

As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes the creative landscape of art-making, questions arise as to the connection between the process that leads to an artwork and the experience of it. The current study examines the influence that awareness of the art-making process has on people’s art experience, especially in the context of using digital technology and AI. We introduce the Skill-Tech Space (STS), the quadrants of which distinguish four broad categories of art-making processes, by combining high level and low level of craftsmanship (‘skill’) with high level and low level of technology (‘tech’). Participants (N=203) watched a short video to increase awareness of one of these four forms of art-making, after which their experience of artworks was measured, in terms of artfulness, beauty, intentionality, creativity, and emotional intensity. Stimuli were combined and analysed in two categories: figurative and abstract artworks and human-made and computer-generated (CG) artworks. Subtle yet significant differences were found between figurative and abstract artworks and between human-made and CG artworks, in relation to the particular video participants had watched in the first phase of the experiment. Furthermore, there were also interaction effects between the level of craftsmanship and level of technology in the video on participants’ subsequent assessments and emotional intensity. Results demonstrate how awareness of art-making might affect experiences of artworks and show the merit of the STS framework.