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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."
I always thought art made you question some aspect of the world around you. I guess this raises the question "who is the artist?".
Saying you do not think it is art does not mean it is not art, it just means that you in particular cannot find a way to connect to the images. I'm sure other people could (my mother, for example, was at one point very into Howard Hodgkin, a painter who uses apparently random strokes - I couldn't see what she was on about, but I would still classify those paintings as art).
Matthew
however, the work of programmers who created it could be considered art, the big difference from a painting is that this art is interactive.
the work isn't just the one image, it's the whole thing.
Remember that the algorithms that makes it have been created by someone, and probably tweaked a bit too.
all this tweaking and coding is not that much different to molding a shape out of clay.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Some people claim that artists do random things, and that computers can do art.
The real way to find out is to do some kind of "turing test" for art.
Art isn't about being pretty. Art is about emotional, spiritual communication between an artist, his culture, work of art, and public.
And you're saying this isn't? The artist is the programmer. His communication is the flash and how you interact with it.
but we are exposed not to beauty of their code, but some - in my eyes - random graphical effects. you're just expanding concept of the art to level, where anything goes.
:)
I know, its quite stylish today, postmodernism... but I prefer here to be conservatist.
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 :)
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.
If someone could explain what makes this so groundbreaking maybe I'd have a better appreciation of it.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
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
The real thing that irks me about this project is that IT'S NOT ART.
I've never fully understood why it's important to determine if something is art or not. I don't care if this thing is "art" or not, I just think it sucks-ass. Something having attained the status of "art" gives it no special status.
AccountKiller
I see no great leap to conclude that, similarly, a "Turing test" for art would be biased and thus worthless if it solely had human judges. Art to me may be junk to you, and visa-versa.**
So any "Turing test" for art would quickly degenerate into something like David Letterman's bit, "Is This Anything?" And if you've seen that, you'll know how pointless this whole discussion really is.
* Of course, any computer that passed the Turing test would be just as biased at judging it as any human, which in a way proves my point -- only I can judge a Turing test to my own satisfaction.
** Naturally, if a computer were capable of judging a "Turing test" for art, a computer would be capable of creating that art, thus mooting the entire discussion.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Apparantly, it's the fact that it's done with PHP. I guess PHP is considered incapable of doing this, and thus getting PHP to do it amazes some folk. I'm not familiar enought with PHP to be either amazed or underwhelmed by this announcement, but I do find it amusing, and I haven't even RTFA!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Wassily Kandinsky, father of abstract art.
Really? And here I thought it was Moliere.
Abstract was always the lowest common denominator. Look at some real Abstract Art and compare, the lowly generated stuff to me is no better than a winamp visualization. Sure it can pump out as much visual stimuli as you will allow but what does any of it mean? Abstraction of thought still requires recognition of said thought in the first place or it is mere bullshit or automated bullshit. The human element in art is far from gone, computer generated music and visual arts have always fallen short imho.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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 |
See Daniel Dennett and the intentional stance... Art is always intentional. Even if you just drop your ketchup by accident then think it is pretty and photograph it for the wall, you're still accomplishing intention after having made the pattern. You're intending it to be something.
This is why not every shit you take or every footprint you make is a work of art. You don't intend them to be. You can easily intend one to be if you like. At that point we can start having heated discussions about whether the shit can be art, but not before.
In this case, then, you could easily say that the program is a piece of art, but any invidual animation is NOT. It is the totality of the images which is art, and that totality was not created by the computer. The program is a sort of multi-dimensional sculpture visible only from a certain perspective. The artist is the programmer.
To say the computer is the artist here is the equivalent of taking the missing arms of the Venus de Milo, then saying that the arms are a work of art and that the Venus made that work. The Venus didn't make anything, it just existed and broke.
"Then why is it when I go to a museum some random images are passed of as art?"
:-)
I have done a bit of random generated musics, so I might be able to answer this.
The random is not truely random -- there was some alg that the artist designed that created it. My roommate paints and watching him sometimes, he's slapping his brush down and doesn't know exactly where its going to land, but its going to land within specific parameters he gave it...some have VERY specific parameters, others not so specific.
The alg could be considered like that. You can state exactly what you want, or you can state generally what you want.
Past that, there is the human element of weeding out the bad. Or compositing these now pseudorandom bits into something new. Honestly, a photographer is as much about the art as well -- its not like he can grow a mountain exactly the way he wants it -- he finds his subject and then finds the best way to present it. In a sense, his subject is just as random (though refined though billions of years as opposed to hours of programming).
So, if you go into a museum and see random art -- it might be random, but its creation most certainly wasn't, nor was its selection and presentation. The art comes into play when the human imparts his or her opinions on the work -- sometimes even just the title can change your attitude on the subject (I've don't this with my random musics -- given different titles and watched as people would tell me that one of the titled pieced implying a relationship felt different that the one that implied a martian landscape or locked in the basement). You random image is only a small part of the art...anyone that doesn't get this doesn't understand art
But the impact of post-modernist thought on the art world has made it such that it's no longer important what the initial thought was ... now the viewer decides, with post-modernism there is no objective concept. So, to spell it out ... it doesn't matter what the artists concept is so long as the viewer perceives that there is one!
Of course there's a case for us having entered post-post-modernism but it's not clear on the complexion of that value system yet, IMHO.
PS: I'm an objectivist personally, I believe in objective truth, lot's of people don't appear to though.
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!
How is this different from a painting, where the visual representation is more static, yes, but is still influenced by the views and state of mind of the audience at the time, the light conditions, context in society (a painting of the WTC shown before and after 9/11 would likely evoke very different reactions, for instance), and in the same way we are not exposed to the artistic process, and only a very few of us are exposed to the beauty of the "raw" work closes to the source code: What techniques were applied to achieve the effects that people react to? What principles does the visual composition follows? Why were the colour scheme chosen?
And yes, K++ DOES contain code that imposes a specific set of principles for visual composition, and colour scheme among others.
Whether it's good art is highly subjective, but deriding it as just "some random graphical effects" is ignoring what it is: An exposition of how heuristics applied to randomness can be used to create graphics that emulate the esthetics of an artistic genre.
What makes it not art?
No - I don't know. Or rather "so you say". Beautiful, pretty, elegant, stunning ... start defining them, try locking them in a box and you start having problems. They are not tightly defined quantifiable essences.
For something to be "art" it must be able to be appreciated ... it mustbe pretty to somone in some way
"Pretty" != "meaningless fluff" but is simply a statement of appreciation. I'm pretty, that code's pretty neat this picture is pretty that workbench is your pretty ... perhaps I go to far.