But is it legit …. ?
p2pnet.net Feature:- If it’s generated by a computer, is it art?
Ask Star Trek’s Lt Cmdr Data ; )
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Computer-Created Art
By Eoban Binder – Apple-X Network
Warning, this is a slightly metaphysical article, and it has almost nothing to do with Macs.
That said, I’ve come to speculate recently about computer-generated art, and to ask questions about it to you, the reader, and I would much appreciate your feedback.
While going through my collection of Star Trek episodes, I came across ones in which Lt. Cmdr. Data, an android, tries painting pictures of his cat Spot in the style of Picasso, and in another he analyses the painting techniques of Captain Picard (rather harshly). In still another, he gives a short violin performance. Obviously, Data is a fictional character in a fictional universe, but it does provoke thought on the possibility of computer art. By this, I do not mean art created by humans with the assistance of computers, such as the use of Maya or Photoshop. This is already a well-understood relationship between the input/output algorithms of a computer which are predictable, and the input/output of a human being which is not. Strictly speaking, a computer is not necessary to create art in the ‘generated’ style; just as you can shade more easily with pencil than with marker, it is not impossible to create a very similar result with marker. Thus, the medium does not have a 100% stranglehold over the ultimate style and genre of the result, though it has a strong influence. Similarly, there are techniques in Photoshop for creating images that resemble, often beyond any distinguishable difference, watercolour paintings, even though Photoshop has no analog watercolour palette, brushes or canvases.
All right, so we’ve established that the tools (the medium) does not necessarily dictate the end result. The second part of the art equation is the information that a creative entity (such as a human) outputs and inputs into the tool/medium. Before we go any further, let’s look at these two images:
What motivated me to write this in the first place was my indecision as to whether I had created these images, or something else did. You see, my procedure for creating these images was visiting typogenerator.net, entering a word (in this case, "Apple-X"), and clicking OK. This is all that I did, and somehow, the images you see above appeared.
Virtually no one would argue that a collage created by a human being is not art. What about a collage created entirely by a computer? Furthermore, this is not merely a bunch of images. The images have been manipulated and arranged in such a way that, for one reason or another, they are pleasing to the human eye. These two images, aside from the watermark in the lower right indicating their origin, are basically indistinguishable from an image that a human might have made in Photoshop.
But there IS a difference. Let’s examine the first image. In the first image, we see text, images, and background. These are the three components of all the images that TypoGenerator creates. The text was input by me. Most of the images appear to fit surprisingly well with the text. There is a blue apple logo, there are portions of screenshots of Mac OS X, and you can make out words such as Journalist, my name, and even my website because TypoGenerator uses various Google searches, for both images and text, to assure at least cursory relevance between the text that I input and the images that appear in the final result.
The difference now makes itself known. TypoGenerator is not selecting the images it uses for their aesthetic value, but because Google is telling TypoGenerator of the association between the word "Apple-X" and "eoban.com" or an image of what is clearly a Mac OS X scroll bar. And how does Google know? Because they appear together on our site. How did they appear together on our site? Because Trent and I arranged it that way.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
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See:-
then some – Every file you ever owned on 1 disc, p2pnet. February 25, 2004
movie collections – Group aims to drastically up disc storage, CNET News, February 2, 2005
Radical disc storage increase
- promise from Japanese group
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If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.
Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.
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February 5th, 2005 at 5:51 am
It’s still humans making art, using the computer as a tool. Human beings wrote TypoGenerator, Google, and every web page or the equations that generate these pages. The elements of chance decided by the computer were orchestrated in an artful way by these writers. A computer can never decide anything that can’t be traced back to a real human being. A computer doing something that the designers didn’t intend makes it no more alive that a book that conveys a meaning the author didn’t intend.