Sol LeWitt had collaborators, not agents

Designers and developers have rediscovered Sol LeWitt. As their job becomes orchestrating swarms of agents LeWitt offers a kind lens to frame their current predicament. They write the instructions, the agents carry them out. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art" has turned into "the prompt becomes the agent that makes the software."

It’s pattern matching and creates a nice frame to view the changing nature of our work. Instead of feeling alienated by the fact that we are no longer controlling the interfaces or writing the code, we elevate our role to that of orchestrator and conceptual artist. It’s a easy comparison to make but it is breaks once you realize a core insight that makes LeWitt’s work unique: the relationship between LeWitt and his collaborators.

Take Wall Drawing 1247 at Mass MoCA, first drawn by a team that included John Hogan. Hogan began drawing for LeWitt in 1982 and continues to this day. He has progressed from Wall Drawing Draftsman for the Sol LeWitt Studio to Installations Director Sol Le Witt Wall Drawings for the LeWitt Estate and is now responsible for keeping the practice alive. At Yale he continues to train new draftspeople and views this work as an act of conservation.

The instructions for a wall drawing are typically short: a few sentences about lines and directions, a diagram. They are open to interpretation and that is by design. But throughout his career a core group of draftspeople executed. Unlike the agents of today that get swapped out every month/week/day that a new release happens, the work accumulated and changed. Within this collaboration, there was room for both LeWitt and Hagan, and 44 years later they are still in conversation after LeWitt’s passing.

No amount of markdown files, skills or context systems can replicate that. Those are notes that I leave for a stranger, a fresh context window at the start of a conversation. The learning only runs one way. I spend time getting to know the model, it’s quarks and habits only for that version to be retired or the interface/harness we are talking through to change underneath me. LeWitt died in 2007 and his wall drawings are still being made, because Hogan persists and is teaching people who will persist after him. With agents the relationship is inverted. I’m the one who stays. My collaborator is the one who disappears.

-Mello