If the likes of Tolstoy and Beethoven are to be believed, art is important in part because it speaks to some essential humanity shared by creator and beholder. On Tumblr, artist Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is figuring out what happens when the beholder is less "human" than "reasonably smart piece of software."

Novice Art Blogger, Plummer-Fernandez's Tumblr, chronicles the travails of a "deep learning" algorithm developed by University of Toronto computer scientists as it attempts to make sense of images pulled from Tate's online archives. The results, "[reformatted] into blogposts" by the artist, are funny, poetic, and often completely nonsensical.

Here's Novice Art Blogger's circular take on Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman's Sheep B, which—as its title suggests—depicts a group of sheep:

There is a lot of elephants in the river but also there is a lot of elephants in the river. It is similar to a sandy area with an elephant made from sand.

Novice Art Blogger on Aubrey Williams' Death and the Conquistador:

A close up view of a pizza with one looking at it or it is depicting a pizza that is ready to bite of a large bowl. I'm reminded of a pizza, decorated to look like an angry bird.

Unsurprisingly, the algorithm totally misses the image's context. Williams, a Guyanese painter, was interested in pre-colonial culture on the Caribbean islands, and judging by the painting's title, it depicts a violent scene involving a conquistador and the people he's attempting to conquer. To be fair to Novice Art Blogger, however, when stripped of its politics, Death and the Conquistador uncannily resembles a slice with pepperoni and olives, viewed as close as you can get without your eyes getting greasy. (And is the "angry bird" bit a reference to this guy? The colors are correct.)

Plummer-Hernandez writes in his artist statement that Novice Art Blogger is meant as a comment on the "proliferation of amateur art blogging" on platforms like Tumblr, as well as an investigation into machine intelligence. The nuances of process and politics don't appear to be the algorithm's strong suit, but it does have a disarming way with simile: Brice Marden probably viewed this untitled drawing as a work of pure abstraction, but once you read Novice Art Blogger's take, all you'll see is a row of urinals on the wall.

[h/t Waxy]