From the very beginning, painters depicted the technology of their time. Prehistoric artists at Lascaux immortalized their spears in hunting scenes, Monet painted steam locomotives, and James Rosenquist an F-111 fighter-bomber. The lightning-fast parsing of computer languages and the streaming of multi-gigabyte files would seem to present new challenges to the artist. “Machine Learning” at the Painting Center, however, explores abstract impressions of technology rather than the physical appearances of hardware. This elegant exhibition presents the busy, boldly patterned abstract paintings of four New York City-based artists. As curator Matthew Deleget explains in the exhibition catalog, none of them consciously investigated “machine learning” — a form of artificial intelligence through which computers discern patterns in vast amounts of data. Nevertheless, their paintings all reflect the hyperkinetic, technology-inspired style that has gained a solid niche in the contemporary art scene.