Ever wondered what was on a painting’s mind? Painting acquires sentience in David Robbins’ Artoons. a series of animated cartoons of talking abstract canvases. Each barely longer than the length of a quip, the thirty Artoons comment (in English) on their existential status, crack jokes, self-interrogate, complain, philosophize…. Employing artificial intelligence, Robbins lets art do the talking. “It’s like working with a repertory of actors,” he says, “for whom I’ve written the lines.” Does it need pointing out that the sentience on display is artificial, itself a thing constructed?

“The news here is in the fact of cartoon animations of talking abstract paintings,” says Robbins, “more than in what I’m having them say. Their existence speaks to the objective success of modern art — is there anyone today who doesn’t know what an abstract painting looks like? — and to the digital revolution, which has made their creation efficient and economical. The audiences for art and for entertainment have evolved, as has technology. While the Artoons could have been made at any point in the history of animation, they weren’t, until an entertainment-oriented artist with digital chops thought to make them.” If the Artoons are without precedent in art history, chalk it up to the unique intersection of historical forces.

Exhibiting internationally since debuting in mid-1980s New York, for the last decade Robbins has favored the digital, online exhibition — “no production cost, no clean-up, no shipping, no storage.” Artoons represent another stage in building out the concept of the online show. The playlist of animated cartoons hangs together like an exhibition — in cyberspace. “IRL or URL,” says Robbins,“it’s all synthetic experience.”

Artoons projects beyond the gallery’s walls, to an independent context, Vimeo, where art and entertainment receive equal treatment, as information. On Vimeo, hybrid forms — here, a hybrid of art and entertainment that Robbins terms High Entertainment— meet no resistance. “High Entertainment is made,” he explains, “by combining art’s experimentalism with entertainment’s accessibility.” He asks the gallery to collaborate with a global medium, one which is not only outside the fine art economy but free of art’s interpretation system too. Installed on Vimeo the “paintings” are available to everyone, for free. No commerce means no compromise. Expect plain talk.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t just mean mutating light shows and vernacular surrealism, it means talking cartoon paintings too.