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Ming + PHP5 + AI = Pretty
cyberscribe writes "Project K++ just released its first alpha version today. The project aims to explore computer-generated abstract art using PHP and Ming. The name of the project is an homage to Wassily Kandinsky, father of abstract art. Caution: the Flash movies can be intensive on your graphics card. Other caution: hitting reload to see the next cool computer-generated abstract 'painting' can be highly addictive."
Other other caution: Hitting reload may cause the site to go down faster. Imagine that. Medic!
- Sherman
Looks like their careers are over =(
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
Does the person who submitted this have something personal against the owners of the site or something? I hope they know where to send the bill after their server has been reduced to a useless pile of molten plastic.
If only somebody would generate background midi music!
Just kidding, it's pretty interesting.
Art isn't about being pretty. Art is about emotional, spiritual communication between an artist, his culture, work of art, and public.
some random images are no more art than some randomly placed things on my workbench.
this could be reall sweet on platforms supporting using a web page as a wallpaper
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Sounds like a deserving candidate for the Museum of Bad Art
very kewl. not art. but keeeeeeewllll
Who thought that was cool? It's so totally unimpressive as to be funny.
(Netscapre 7.2)
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
What exactly does the AI do? Yeah, it has to decide on some basic actions eg adding a circle, but is that worthy of the term AI?
Surely it's not that complex. Correct me if I'm wrong, but AI is an overstatement.
-Ashton
great... but I always get the same pattern. Whats up with that?
I used too produce stuff like this on my atari what.. 15 or more years ago, in basic. I'm not impressed in the slightest. Thumbs down for an image that looks like it could have been produced by my little brother with a crayon.
Now if you truly want some cool abstract art, try debris by Brennen Underwood of nullsoft fame. For some reason it has a tendancy too gather porn pictures in the images it creates. Is it because there's a lot of porn on the net? Or is it because nullsoft = sex. Try it for yourself and you tell me.
Seeing a KDE icon is somewhat misleading, since besides a K I don't see what's related to kde in this performance. Or has kde reserved *K* trademarks ?
Those graphics are just another example of how useless art can be in the hands of "art people". It's just funny seeing the graphics design majors trying to compete with us, the Computer Science students :)
Andrej Bauer's implementation of random art better, personally.
I think the father of abstract art just turned in his grave....
I hit about ten of those random abstracts. They all--every one of them--looked like something I would have seen in a hair salon in the late '80s, early '90s. It's not exactly difficult to grab a few geometrical shapes in various colors and slap them on a solid background. Personally, I'd rather look at those horrid Nagel prints than this pseudo-abstract rubbish. Interesting computer project? Maybe. Art? Absolutely not.
Evolvotron
From the page: Evolvotron is an interactive "generative art" application for Linux to evolve images/textures/patterns/animations through an iterative process of random mutation and user-selection driven evolution. It's not running in Flash, you may render all images to arbitrary resolutions and is perfect for creating new desktop backgrounds... Also check the Gallery and Animations.
The code is licensed under the GPL. It uses Qt and is multi-threaded.
The project itself really doesn't impress me. All the K++ people did was use a random number generator to generate colors, gradients, curve coordinates, circles, etc. The actual cool part (Dynamically genereated fully functional Flash movies through PHP) was all the work of the Ming library coders. This is akin to someone creating a spinning rainbow colored 3D cube in OpenGL or someone applying a ton of Photoshop filters to a cool picture of the sky. It looks nice to someone who doesn't know how it was made, but in reality, all of the challenging and innovative things were done by the person who programmed the library, not the person who used some very basic implementation of the library.
This k++ (or whatever) is an ok example, but there are some truly fantastic sites around..Try Pray Station or (one of my hero's) John Maeda. John's work is incredibly beautiful, and he's a half decent coder to boot.
I'd be reeeeeal curious as to how they define "AI". And no, a PHP class that uses interpolation of random numbers to create vectors is NOT AI in my book.
The real thing that irks me about this project is that IT'S NOT ART. There is much more to art than just crapping out random shapes, colors and patterns -- which it appears is all this thing does.
You could make more artistic shapes by giving a paintball gun to a monkey -- or for those on a budget, just by pissing a monkey off.
I'd suggest the developers take a course in Art101, study up on color theory and composition and then create code that takes aesthetics, design and ambient factors into account.
By calling their online mess maker "AI generated modern art" is a grave disservice to both Computer Science and the Fine Arts commmunities all in one.
In response to such heinous crimes against man, machine and nature, I hereby sentence the developes to be the recipient of 100,000 porno popups per annum and be given an AOL CD every month for the duration of their pitiful life... may the lord have mercy on their souls.
I seriously fail to spot the AI in this.
Random number generation is more likely, but I doubt any AI techniques are needed or applicable to this.
www.enterweb.pt
It looks nice to someone who doesn't know how it was made, but in reality, all of the challenging and innovative things were done by the person who programmed the library, not the person who used some very basic implementation of the library.
And that is the difference between art and engineering. Art isn't judged by the amount of work that went into it - it's judged purely by whether people think it looks cool. The same sort of person that thinks Kandinsky's art is good might well think this Flash hack is good as well. Kandinsky wasn't a rocket scientist but for one reason or another he influenced a lot of artists.
(Disclaimer: I'm a hardcore science type who disliked virtually every humanities course I ever took, so I don't really know what I'm talking about.)
Thinnerism's album release pages has cool animated CD cover sleeves I wish I could someday carry around (some kind of iPod with a whole side organic display). Cool...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
it's surprising to me that something this rudimentary would get posted here. there's been so much work in this field! john maeda anyone?
here's some of mine...
http://www.chillproductions.com/smason/artos
try this for something with more substance:
Electric Sheep.
Scott Draves
So how many monkeys sitting at terminals connected to this page before we get a real Kandinsky?
Since when does Flash run on the GPU? This is entirely CPU-bound.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
DISCLAIMER: This software is graphics-intensive. The author is not responsible if viewing these Flash movies causes your web browser or computer to crash. It's not my fault if your video card can't handle it. :-) /. reply: It's not my fault if your server can't handle it. :-)
Honest question, no flamebait: Why did they use PHP? You can create the same effects entirely in ActionScript, the native language of Flash.
wasn't this seen three years ago already? http://www.warprecords.com/brothomstates
I find the pictures to be very nice looking, then again you guys may have a different idea of Art to that of mine.
Have you metaroderated recently?
I was under the impression that the rendering of vectors was more of a strain on your CPU rather than on your graphics card. Unless flash started supporting hardware T&L all of a sudden... Which is highly improbable.
These guys couldn't have possibly coded that in a question of months. This means they must have stolen it from Minix. I think I'm going to write a book about it. I'm so smart.
Wassily Kandinsky, father of abstract art.
Really? And here I thought it was Moliere.
The program made imitations of Mondrian's paintings. Not too hard.
Everything is art. Even your post. Even the interpretation you are making of my post. And God looking at you doing so. Here is mine : their project is poor, not original, not nice, doesn't interest anyone. I wouldn't dare to publish such a piece of shit. Which means that I am to anal-retentive. Here is my shitty art : shit shit shit and shit merde de merde de merde. with a blue flower, and a black box. a white monolithe, and a fractal world. hundred billions of stars. and lot of semen, of tears, and of blood spilled on it. I am sorry, but I feel that I may have hurt you more using just these beautifully shitty words than by just showing a couple of slowly moving green polygons. Please help these guy to get fucked. (and me too.)
While it's interesting in a crude sort of way, it just doesn't capture the intensity, spirit, and complexity of the real thing. You might want to look at what it's trying to imitate. Some samples: Kadinsky, Composition VIII (1923) , Kadinsky, Yellow-Red-Blue (1925), Kandinsky, Decisive Pink (1932). Wouldn't you rather have these on your wall?
Ok,
raise your hand if you haven't done something like this yourself at least once with GDLib & PHP because you were bored.
no-one?
Thought so...
Very cool. I guess I will retire my screensaver and use this instead. Should be easy to write a simple wrapper that fires up a webbrowser (or maybe call mozilla http://mirror/screen.php directly).
Tell you what, go find some software that composes random music, and run that through Milkdrop or Geiss.
;P
Now THAT would be computer generated art, about a billion times more amazing than this, give or take an order of magnitude.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
http://kandid.sourceforge.net/index.html ist is not only more mature but nicer UI crossplatform (ok i dont like java but it works) and the outgoing graphics are really beautiful and also more reusable to me. nonetheless it ist more sophisticated in that way that many minfs kann brew together some forms, it is not just random art. sir lk http://proton-ce.sourceforge.net
Is it art just because you hang it on the wall?
Oh, don't get me started...
Lest anyone think that is good abstract art, come take a look at my site. I computer-generate 3d abstracts. Also, I paint, draw and sculpt, and have been doing so since my youth. Now I have a degree in Fine Art, but still, you should be careful to just patently state that what you are doing is "pretty", because that is a relative term. What does it mean? What is the purpose? To attempt to generate an interesting composition, right? So why not generate it, decide it's interesting, and then show us that one? Why do we all have to sit through 999 bad ones to get to one good one?
stuff |
How is Flash intensive on your graphics card? It's not like it's hardware accelerated. If anything, it's intensive on your CPU.
Who doesn't like free music?
// Do really L337 render loop to impress the slashdot crew
// Wow man this is extreme! The video card may not take it... better do it in flash instead :P
void render()
{
glColor3f(rand(), rand(), rand());
glLoadIdentity();
glBegin(GL_QUADS);
glVertex3f(rand(), rand(), rand());
glVertex3f(rand(), rand(), rand());
glVertex3f(rand(), rand(), rand());
glVertex3f(rand(), rand(), rand());
glEnd();
}
What I just don't understand is that Macromedia licenses the flash specs on the condition that it is used by other products (such as Ming) to create content. Apparently, it is not permitted to use the specs to develop an alternative open-source plugin.
So why is that? It's not like Macromedia is making any money on the plugins, and besides: the more compatible plugins are out there, the larger the userbase for Flash, right?
Can someone here explain this to me?
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
See the Firefox FAQ.
It's easy.
Kandinsky is such old news. When I see an AI art generator that can make a dress out of meat or sell jars of its own excrement for six figures, then I'll be impressed.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
when is it going to be ported to xscreensaver?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Any idea how to control this app wither through script of the command line? Number of pictures for example.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
So this conglomeration of PHP and Ming will let you download the latest Britney Spears single while protecting you from the RIAA???
:)
-JT
I've gotton a completely black image 3 out of 6 times trying it. Is that art?
I see lots of negative comments, and I really don't think this program deserves it since it's just at the first version and maybe it shouldn't even have been posted yet until it actually does something more visually appealing. What can be seen so far is just the potential. And for me this is really interesting. Only failing is that it's Flash not SVG but that's just my taste.
I notice for example that the author is also a poet who knows Neruda and uses a bit of surrealism. Vector based art is probably the best way of recreating what was pioneered by a similar artistic genre - Futurism - which used early 19th century typography to produce incredible works of art in written text, echoing the onomatopeia of battles and love of violence and war (ok nobody's perfect). So loads of text all over the place, and perhaps moving about - this is perfect media to showcase a program like this. There are lots of examples (try googling for futurist typography or go here http://www.colophon.com/gallery/futurism/14.html for a look at some of it).
So I think the author should merge some of his skills and a very good bit of software/art could result.
The other is an area less touched: improvisational scores - the rules by which experimental artists can improvise. No longer do people have to be bound by what can be printed, and there are now some examples of software based improvisation scores (wish I could find more examples of the more experimental of these, but am submerged by crap sw when I search). I made one in svg for example. So this program, if it's to merge vector graphics with AI, could go in this direction, maybe supplying some kind of interaction and participation in a live multimedia event or performance?
So I see lots of room for improvement but loads of potential here!
I'm not a big fan of art that looks like my 4 year old did it. Paint splatters that sell for millions of dollars, I _just don't get it_. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate some art and admittedly I don't know enough about it to describe what kinds I like but I can point to it. :)
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
...or does this look a lot like the iTunes Visualizer on Valium, and without the music?
Tim
If you think that you either haven't bothered to study the generated images nor the code, or are just plain clueless.
If they'd been entirely random, the images would have been a complete mess. They are not. They follow quite a few rules to produce images that are more visually pleasing that random data would have been.
Before I start, THIS IS NOT TROLL, NOR FLAMEBAIT. I'm just answering the question.
Its getting such negative responses because firstly, its not AI, secondly its not "pretty" art, basically; it sucks more than a horny prostitute.
Seriously, how difficult do you think it is to make that? They use a PHP library to show random shapes in flash.. I don't know the flash libraries myself, but I know it will be extremely easy - going on the GD, MySQL, PSpell and various other libaries PHP offers (btw, I could write this using static images in about 20minutes flat, probably less). They don't use any advanced techniques to actually show the art, its just random colours with random shapes in random places.
Thats why its not impressive in the least.
One could couple this page with javascript and you could make your webserver display a screensaver if someone was idle on your webpage too long. When the animation detects mouse movement, have the browser reload your page.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Engineering isn't judged by the amount of work that went into it, it's merely judged on how well it works. No one cares if you do all of your calculations on a slide rule or an abacus, they just want to drive over your bridge without dying. If it's sufficiently well-used it then will be judged by "how cool it looks," like any piece of art.
Now some people will admire the work that is involved -- but they're likely to be engineers.
And many artists will care about the talent involved in making a piece.
"Pretty" != "meaningless fluff"
... Of course, YMMV - so I apologize for making that statement too definite. De gustibus non disputandum. ^_^
Agreed. But how do you distinguish between being "pretty" and "beautiful"? You're right (and I didn't contest that) when saying these attributes are subjective. For me, "pretty" means that there's some (important) level where I don't 'connect' - if I did, it would be "beautiful".And since art is about connecting
His latest project, Aaron, is the result of many years of experiment and refinement. The K++ project can draw abstract polygons. Aaron can draw portraits, landscapes, and still lives using perspective, detail, and composition.
Other stuff looks kind of like procedural textures (e.g., Kelly A Keigwin) or pattern-drawing programs with bugs in them (e.g., Rhonda Leigh Brewer).
There is some wheat (e.g., Virginia Kilpatrick), but most it is chaff IMO.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Some of van Gogh's art was less than stellar, but much of it was brilliant.
He seemed to have some trouble with man-made objects ("Van Gogh's Bedroom", "Van Gogh's Chair", "The Church at Auvers"), but most of his landscapes ("Starry Night over the Rhône", "The Starry Night", "Two Poplars on an Hill", "Olive Trees", "A Path through a Ravine", "Road with Cypresses") and many of his still-lifes ("Sunflowers" (several versions), "Irisis") were just stunning.
In addition, many of his portraitures, while technically inaccurate, are very evocative ("The Potato Eaters", "Portrait of Doctor Paul Gachet").
Finally, his treatment of color was, at the time, revolutionary, both in its choice (e.g., blues and greens for skin color) and its application (e.g., broad strokes with a palette knife).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Great! Sounds like someone caught the vision of what this project is about. Actually, I've gotten some nice emails on the topic as well. Funny how people tend to give appreciation in person, and sarcasm anonymously.
But even in the sarcasm I've gleaned a lot of useful feedback. For one thing, it has helped me to write a little FAQ to answer some of the questions on this thread:
http://www.robertpeake.com/CannedKandinsky/faq.htm l
The only question I didn't answer was the implied question: didn't your servers go down? The colo I use has a great mix of Tier-1 fibre connections. I also load balanced between a couple servers to help the CPUs out. But I think the biggest factor in all this is that the art is all vector-based. If it were rich media, it would be a whole different story. But the average K++ "painting" is only about 8-12K. Hats off to the creators of the SWF file format!
Cheers,
Robert
Great! Sounds like someone caught the vision of what this project is about. Actually, I've gotten some nice emails on the topic as well. Funny how people tend to give appreciation in person, and sarcasm anonymously.
But even in the sarcasm I've gleaned a lot of useful feedback. For one thing, it has helped me to write a little FAQ to answer some of the questions on this thread:
http://www.robertpeake.com/CannedKandinsky/faq.htm l [robertpeake.com]
The only question I didn't answer was the implied question: didn't your servers go down? The colo I use has a great mix of Tier-1 fibre connections. I also load balanced between a couple servers to help the CPUs out.
But I think the biggest factor in all this is that the art is all vector-based. If it were rich media, it would be a whole different story. But the average K++ "painting" is only about 8-12K. Hats off to the creators of the SWF file format!
The other part of all this that fascinates me is how severe some people's reactions have been to the idea of computer-generated art. You'd think it was a discussion of computer-generated religion. :)
I think this, in part, has prompted such heavy criticism of the project code itself in its current state - to say "this, here, now is not art." That's great - in fact, that's the purpose of the project: to explore what people consider aestheticaly pleasing (and not). So, we have a baseline.
Onwards and upwards.
Cheers,
Robert