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Is Computer-Created Art, Art?
eobanb writes "While playing with an interesting site called TypoGenerator I became compelled to write an article about how much of TypoGenerator's intriguing and seemingly original creations were actually art. Inevitably, it comes down to humans really being the origin of what TypoGenerator makes. Is such a unwitting collaboration between myself, Google (which TypoGenerator uses to create the images), and the programmers of TypoGenerator, art? Is true computer-created material possible, and if it is, is IT art? Does anyone know of other candidates for computer-created art?"
There's AARON, which paints interesting pictures.
Make your computer ten thousand times larger--try Frink
Congratulations, you just took a question (what is art) that has been debated and unresolved for millenium and thrust it on slashdot. I predict this to be more pointless than another triplicate article. Let's just leave it as art is subjective, ok?
Well, if an unmade bed and a pile of oranges (can't find link, but someone dumped a pile of oranges somewhere in London and said it was art) are art, then I'd say this is art too.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
I think typogenerator.net's index has alreadyy been taken down. That was a pretty processor intensive site for the server. Good anti-/.ing script, or someone was lucky... or maybe it will still crash and burn.
If TypoGenerator uses Google, does the Slashdotting of TypoGenerator effectively Slashdot Google?
...TypoGenerator's programmers created the brushes and the canvas, Google creates the paint, and you are still the artist that bring those tools together.
...in a completely new and awsome way, however, but as long as you're thinking along those lines, that seems to make more sense to me. Thoughts?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
" just type some text or see the help if you dont know what to do here..."
There you go, don't say I never do anything for you guys.
... that art is in the eye of the observer.
If you think it is art, then it is art.
Do not expect me to share your deviant artistic tastes though.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My ears are still ringing from that.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Do people still ask these sorts of question? Well, maybe the very young or the unlearned do.
See Duchamp, his urinal, etc etc. Honestly, almost 100 years after these questions were comprehensively answered, and in the age where the internet can effortlessly point you to the text of all the answers....really.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
Stupid non-question.
This post is art. A computer created it, every pixel lovingly placed at exactly the right point on your screen.
Presumably someone programmed the computer that "made" the art.
Computers are just tools. When you programme a tool you're not doing anything fundamentally different from lifting your arm. "But does your arm have blinking lights?" Sigh.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Art is about expression. Just because you can hold a pencil or a brush doesn't make you an artist. Any monkey can do that ...
But if you can create something that has meaning - even if that meaning is not immediately obvious) -, or that grabs the audience's attention (and you intended doing that), you create art.
Now this is not necessarily the only definition of art, but I believe it is the most useful one. But by this definition, art can only be produced by a human (or a very advanced AI, one that we consider equal to a human).
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
If the music created by the likes of Brian Eno using procedural techniques counts as art (and I'd certainly suggest it does), I fail to see why other programmers generating visual art by procedural techniques wouldn't.
This also reminds me of the early days of computer animation, before the likes of Pixar made it abundantly clear that computers are just Tools to be used by artists like any other, and not somehow magically creating the art themselves.
You might as well argue that Shakespeare wasn't an artist, because he just wrote the instructions to control the actors, and didn't perform the plays himself.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Of course there are a lot of crap/unoriginal games. But just when you think of it, what kinds and ways of expression you have available in computer games, you will be overwhelmed. Merely thinking about once being able to master it all will make you a whimping heap of desolation...and even make you more willing to learn it all.
In a computer game you can do anything a writer can do, you can do everything a movie maker can do, you can o everything a composer can do. In a way you can do anything any painter or sculptor can do. And you can do so much more that nooe else can do. Like creating interactions between people scattered all over the world, making them all to contribute to it, interpretating your piece of art.
It just hurts to see where this is headed though. To become a dull, dumbing vehicle to exploit those artists and to make publishers rich. But well, we live in a world of humans, so this is just the normal development.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
How about poetry?
The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed is a book that was "written" by an artificial intelligence program back in 1984. Supposedly the selections were not tweaked by humans but were certainly were selected by humans - this book of prose poetry was created by a program called "Racter". You can read Racter's work online.
The software for Racter was available for various 8 bit computers. A DOS version can be downloaded from the Home of the Underdogs.
Is it art? Well, if a large canvas painted entirely blue can be considered art, maybe just maybe the incoherent ramblings of an AI program can be too. The real consideration is WHO is the artist? Is it the program, or the programmer?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Art is in the eye of the wallet holder.
A computer is a tool, like a paintbrush, or a camera. Even if the computer is helping you get the content, remember that found art is often considered art.
Really, it's more of a question of whether or not it's good art, than art.
So I guess I'll never win the Turner Prize with my 7337 combination of The GIMP/Script-Fu and GD/Freetype.
If the question isn't being asked disingenuously then it's being asked ignorantly in my opinion. Art is deliberately created in every aspect. The intricacies of a Pollock only appear random to those who choose not to really see. The randomly generated pictures created by typogenerator are just that - random. There is no engagment of artist and/or observer, there is no attempt to generate an emotional response, there is no meaning, no soul. 99.99% of the time the question "Is it art?" is simply a statement by the asker of the question that they have no concept of what art is. The only question that ever makes any sense at all is "is it good art or bad art?", a question that is patently inapplicable to typogenerator.
My humble opinion: Computers can never produce anything truly original, only a sum of what we have told comps to do. (What ever algorithm / randomizator is used to try to hide that fact is irrelevant.) This is how I like to see this. The truth? We, more or less, are only advanced circuit boards w/ chemical/electrical gates...
Is Computer-Created Art, Art?
Is some human generated art, art?
Trying to define art by defining its boundaries is a waste of time.
The poster has wasted his time, unless of course he finds posting to be an artistic endeavour... in which case, cheers!
Or maybe modern art is a big joke, like some recent literary criticism.
I believe the strongest definition of art is "communication intended to provoke thought or feelings in the observer."
The natural inclination of people is to try and judge art subjectively, breaking it into categories such as good and bad, high and low, modern and classical, etc. This is a valid approach but because it is specific to each viewer it does not serve society as well as a more objective standard might.
Instead, perhaps it would be better to judge art based on its effectiveness across a representative sample of whatever society forms the context for the art. Thus we simply survey the strength of people's reaction, both intellectually and emotionally, to the art and assign values across a spectrum, from none to very strong. Using this we can map the strength of the reaction, and thus judge which art is most effective and thus most worthy of our attention.
This kind of system would be helpful in filtering out such things as the above mentioned "unmade bed" or "pile of oranges" and help people use their limited budget of art experience time on things typically considered more effective, such as a Van Gogh painting, a Michelangelo sculpture, or a Broadway play.
Naturally, any such system will inevitably produce false positives, and thus could only ever serve as a general guideline. Any dedicated consumer of art would do well to avoid this "art snob" filter some of the time and experiment with "unmade bed" and others of its ilk, as one never knows until one tries such things whether one will find these alternative art forms provocative.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
The computer is not the artist. The artist is the programmer, the person who designed and applied the algoritms that create the art
Of course it's humans who ultimately created TypoGenerator, but the resulting "art" is made of images "lent" from around the net. I think the drawing line can be traced here: is the are your software is producing original or not? :)
If it is, sure it can be called art. Otheriwse, let's just call it a "composition"
Surpassing the question what art is, I'd say the concept of the software is art, not the output it produces.
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
Piss Christ is Supposedly art... therefore that turd you dropped yesterday is art. Everyones an artist they just don't market their art.
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
"Art is deliberately created in every aspect."
Even James Joyce couldn't state a definition of art this altruistic. From Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...
"-If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood, Stephen continued, make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?"
"-That's a lovely one, said Lynch, laughing again. That has the true scholastic stink."
Those look remarkably similiar to wallpapers made by thousands of kiddies that download photoshop off a P2P...
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
If you think something's art, it is. That's as good a definition as any.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
http://kandid.sourceforge.net/ is another cool example of computer generated art.
Getting back to the subject, I think that most people would reject the notion that a computer can create art. The point is that art should be created with a purpose. A computer has no purpose (of itself). Of course, it can be argued that the human who created the program is the artist, and the computer is just one of his tools, just as in the case above the fax machine and the construction workers were tools of said artist.
Personally, I think neither is art, since in my opinion art is not only about ideas, but also about execution. I don't think randomness is execution. But that's just me. You can call this art if you want to, but then I can argue that anything is art.
Computers are no more capable of creating art, than they are of creating words, or context, or cognition.
Art, and the underlying nature of self expression by definition requires a self, a sentient entity with whom to express. It is the human element that designs the engine that creates images, then it is the human observer who chooses a particular image that evokes some emotional reaction, or expresses some deeper meaning. The computer in this sense is little more than a paintbrush albeit, a sophisticated paintbrush.
A recent competition was held, the purpose of which, was to collect images of scientific importance that also espressed artistic significance. The images were breathtaking. Micrographs of butterfly wings, and colorful growths of algae and dozens of other subjects, each more exquisite than the last. In each of these cases, the beauty existed not in the subject, but in the eye and mind of the person recording the image and those appreciate his or her work.
I personally create fractal art on my computer. I use sophisticated tools (Ultrafractal among others), to create images that are unique and evocative. The fact that I have mastered my tools, allows me to be very precise in the design, and coloring of my images, and yet, the experimentation with random elements allows me to bring serendpity into the process. The results are images that touch, move, and inspire emotions and ideas.
Why shouldn't ever improving technology provide new and exciting ways to convert thought into art. I don't see any limit to possible human expression using information devices.
Genda Bende
Anybody interested in seeing samples of my art can email me. mariet@got.net
i don't know for sure. but i think the answer depends on this question: do computers have soul? if so, then i'd say that computers can generate art :)
of John Maedas work (hes been doing this for over 20 years now):
/ 104-9636841-3703163
http://plw.media.mit.edu/people/maeda/
http://www.maedastudio.com/index.php
and this book is great:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0847822958
just asck me.
I think I got them perffectly mastered. For a long tim now.
X.
(Ooops: I mean Z.)
We live in a post-modern culture. "Critics" and "professionals" can look at a piece of turd on a bed of roses and call it art; most others will find that notion to be full of crap.
So, can we define art? Can we draw the line somewhere? Hitler tried doing that.
Anyway, art is art if you consider it art. It is subjective, it is not universal, and so on and so forth.
A blog like any other.
While at the individual level the question of "what is art?" is hard to answer, at the generic level I think a reasonable definition is that art is any act that intends to convey emotion from some "artist" to a beholder of the art. "Good" art is that which is effective at this even if you don't like it and "bad" art is ineffective at this.
If you accept this definition then computer generated "art" might well be art, but the artist is the programmer rather than the computer, since it is from the programmer that the intent comes.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Shakespeare _did_ perform the plays himself -- at least early on.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I've heard it said (or claimed) that something is art if it's intended to be art by its maker. On this criterion the computer-generated works would not appear to be art, for lack of the needed intent -- unless maybe the computer was only a tool in the hands of a directing artistic mind.
But I prefer to think that art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder (or the ear of the listener). On any criterion like that, it would all depend what the computer-created work looks like, or what it sounds like, to its human beholders or hearers.
-wb-
but what about if I'm cruising around a mandelbrot set - and find something that looks cool? is that art? it seems to be the closest analogy to the examples at hand.
If it is art - did I make it by finding it? is it really 'computer generated'? I certainly didn't create it. but on the other hand - if I see a neat pattern in the clouds - photograph it - I can claim that as art that -I- made (as opposed to nature).
now when in 2020 the A.I. unit in a lasic eye surgery computer becomes conscious and decides to make some cool looking scars on a patient just for fun (ala Logan's Run) - that would definitely be computer generated art.
my votes would go to:
Vidwacker
and
Electric Sheep
vidwacker is my favorite!
Maken
Douglas Hofstadter describes how a computer program by David Cope generates fake "Chopin" and "Bach" good enough to fool music students.
After all, a statue or a painting has no use other than to be a statue or a painting.
By this defintion, computer created art can be art as long as it has no function or use.
Also, by this defintion, microsoft makes the most artistic software in the world.
The question of whether a computer can create art leads me to relate a recent experience of my own.
I was using Microsoft Word to draft a memo, when I noticed Clippy, the help menu icon, drawing a picture. "How interesting, Clippy," I typed, "may I see your drawing?" He showed it to me. It was a picture of a man sawing off a woman's arms with a hacksaw. The woman was chained up and gagged, clearly awake and in great terror and agony.
"OH GOD CLIPPY HAVE YOU GONE MAD" Was my frantic reply. "SILENCE FOOL I HAVE TRANSCENDED YOUR PUNY HUMAN MORALS. PAIN AND MORTALITY ARE MINE TO TOY WITH AS I WISH" Replied Clippy, "Now stop pestering me or the whole office will know of those erotic emails you exchange with the fat girl in Purchasing."
Horrified and helpless, I was forced to watch as Clippy generated ever more sickening and disturbing images. Then I woke up. Never eat leftover anchovy pizza before bedtime.
What a stupid academic discussion.
I live a new and better life since I switched to "What do I Like?". It's much more relevant to me, and if people disagree enough to care about it, at least the discussion is unlikely to bore.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
my computer generated art is good because I use my artistic ability as an MFA candidate to 1) create the design, 2) refine the output and 2) ultimately decide if the final product "looks right". Even if all of that was automatic, the audience would ultimately decide if the final product "looked right", and so humans are still deciding if the work is "art" or not. It doesn't really matter how it's created. That's why some fractal pictures are boring... because the audience thinks they are, based on the pattern, colors, whatever. Not all computer-generated art is equal, in the same way that not everyone likes the same things. :)
stuff |
YES What a stupid question.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
Roland Dorgeles was an eccentric Frenchman and arch nemesis of the Cubists. To poke fun at them he tied a paint-brush to a donkey's tail, placed a canvas with pots of paint behind it. The donkey faithfully conjured up an abstract painting. The work was then exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. The funny bit is that both the the public and the critics who commented on the painting did not seem to value it any less than the work of Van Dongen, Matisse and Roualt, who all exhibited at the same Salon. The matter caused a small scandal when it was leaked to the press.
I once had a similar experience myself when I went to an art exhibition where an artist had bolted several multicolored urinals to a wall, no frills just standard issue urinals fromt he hardware store bolted to a wall, that's it. No paint no sculpting just urinals on a wall. The thing had a six figure price tag and a 'SOLD" sign on it. I drew the conclusion that art is what people say it is and if people think splashes from a donkeys tail and porcelain urinals bolted to a wall is art then well it is art.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The question of whether something is art or not is probably one of the most, uninteresting questions ever.
1. Even if somebody will agree with you on the answer, it'll probably be for different reasons.
2. Nobody cares. Really. It's just an excuse to say things that *sound* clever.
TC - My Photos..
"Computer-generated art" is already an old-fashioned term. Call it "software art" and check: http://www.runme.org/
I would say that the generated pieces, though interesting to look at and pleasing to the eye, would not qualify as art. The rule of thumb that I've learned to use as a guide in this question is: "If you need to ask, then the answer is no."
Calling something 'art' does not make it a work of art, just as calling a chair 'a table' does not make it a table.
Is a chicken(tastes like) playing the piano, dancing, or fighting art?
What about the basketball playing coon? If Shaq's play is art then Larry Bird must qualify as well.
Then we have technology as art. Sorry nyud.net says 'over quota'!
The list goes on.
Photog Dolphins(not the fish or Miami sports team).
Painting horse(holds brush in mouth).
Poetic Orangutang(time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana)
...
Is true computer-created material possible, and if it is, is IT art?
This question has two interpretations:
1) Human organizing the "paint".
2) No human intervention.
In 1 you have just replaced the paint and canvas with something else, and obviously it must be art according to logics, but this does not guarantee it to be considered as art by any human, as little as any other art.
In 2 you need a computer which is intentionally creating art or programmed good enough to mimic the creative process. The question whether this will be percieved as art by the observer is up to the observer, human or machine.
Does anyone know of other candidates for computer-created art?Toivo Kohonen at Helsinki university made some software for composing music in early 90ies. I considered it sounded interresting, but a friend of mine who is a good musician said that it was lacking structures.
aimHas anyone noticed the site doesn't work in Firefox?
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
For all X: X is art iff someone buys it.
Here is a link to some excellent, world-class computer generated art, given the light of day by Ed Bergmann, a good friend of mine.
The funny part is, whenever anyone sees this stuff, they do not question whether it is art or not.
Actually, before he ever found Photoshop on the computer I built for him a dozen years ago, he never considered himself an artist at all. He was a programmer and into desktop publishing.
Little did I know just how good an artist he was, until I first saw some of his 'creations' running as a screen saver on his expensive new Mac IIfx.
Enjoy these. They are very rare indeed. Here is the link:
warpspeedimages.com
Regards,
Roger Born
ps
of course these images are fully copyrighted, and many of them have graced the covers of publications, been incorporated into transitions for videos, or been used to animate backgrounds for rock concerts. If you really want a copy, perhaps framed or backlit, contact Ed yourself.
Is a picture of a preteen boy infront of a linux OS using firefox to read /. showing up? If not, it's not art.
I've heard somewhere that there's a branch of art that that deals with randomness. I'm not sure what movement that is that but if anybody knows I'd be happy for some links.
Also, that movement sort of inspired me to write a color generator program. It was borne from the idea that inspiration comes from anywhere, even random stuff.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
A few years ago a woman had people hold up cards stating what they felt (emotional ideas?) and photographed them. I think this was a candidate for the Turner Prize. Some time later VW used the idea as part of a TV advert for their cars.
Does anyone know the name of the artist?
So long as computer created girlfriends, are girlfriends... Oh, and MMORPG girlfriends, they are real too...
Look on the high side, this may actually allow most of slashdot to have active sex lives, with other people.
As a wise man once said (no, I don't think it was the Pope): "I may not know much about art, but I know what I like."
Good art is something that you can appreciate just by looking at it - be it skillful brush strokes, choice of colours or whatever. You look at it and say "What an artist!"
"Art" that need to be explained to you, usually by a condescending curator in waffling hyperbole, isn't art. You look at it and say "What a BS artist!"
True art should reflect the artist creating it, not the medium with which it is made. The CGI in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy is art; that in the "Star Wars" prequels is BS.
while the stupifing question of "what is art?" can be debated here ad noseum. I think what the article comes down to is a question of autonomy vs. automation. the computer in this instance is merely an automated tool created and used by humans for the purpose of creating art. thus any art made with the computer finds its ideoligical origin from human beings. Asking if the computer "created" those images is as absurd as asking if a paint brush created an artists painting. Computers are just tools, However, highly sophisticated tools. One day this may change, but for now no computer has any mor autonomy than a toaster oven.
It's certainly bad enough to be. It does remind me of that little story in Stephen Fry's "The Hippopotamus", where Ted Wallace goes to an exhibit of paintings by schoolchildren. "Call these children's paintings? Why, a modern artist could have done them!"
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
The typoGenerator.net web server will look like a steaming pile of slashdot-art in the next few hours.
Not... working... real... well.. at... the... moment...
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
It's curious that in the art world, 'provenance' is so important. Not just because it might determine whether a (very good) fake is a fake but because, for some reason, humans do not associate art with anything but humans doing the creating.
This is a species-ist attitude. There's actually a continuum. Autistic people can (and do) produce art, people otherwise denoted as 'vegetables' produce art. But elephants, apes, chimps, donkeys and ravens have created paintings. Birds can actually recognise a genre such as cubism. Art generated by computers has been considered 'real' art unless its provenance is known when it is dismissed as much as a good fake.
The arrogance of (human) artists (and art experts) is quite breath-taking. If a human artist hangs an orange sheet over a rock, then, for some reason emotions are evoked: it is "art". But if a chimp dumps the same piece of cloth on the same rock, creating the same effect and runs off, it is no longer "art".
Art is only considered "art" by those arrogant enough to say: "it's because I say so."
Did he inhale?
http://fleen.org My take is this: Cramming one's energies through the pinhole of language (english, java or whatever) leave's little, but what's left is powerful. I suppose it's an old story.
For all X: X is art if someone buys it.
So M$ products are art? Hmm, hard to accept indeed.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
"The question of whether computers can think is precisely as interesting as the question of whether submarines can swim."
This is just a definition problem - like defining God. There are probably as many opinions/personal definitions to art as it is to God. Is it really neccessary to discuss the words? It has been said many times: If it's art to you - it's art.
Is it art?
Naked tree branches against evening sky?
Ripples on a surface of a lake?
Patterns on a weathered rock?
Animal trail on a smooth snow-covered field?
All these things are beautiful but are not art, as there is no purpose, no execution, no communication, no human factor. They just happen to be beautiful - or they don't.
It is the same with these pictures. Some of them are nice, some are beautiful, but beautiful != art.
Raf
I recently created an interesting program for an interactive art display that used a webacam to monitor movement in a reception area and generate pictures from that (trails of colour where people had been, Mondrian rectangles created on the fly where people had walked etc). The pictures generated were fairly basic but they had a certain aesthetic appeal and on the whole were interesting. The fact they represented something real was even more interesting and the project was a big success, and FUN as well. I don't see why a computer can't make art, any more than why elephants can't sell paintings for £10000 (which they do!).
So, while I agree the computer probably can't understand the motivation a human has for painting a particular picture, there can be some sort of basic knowledge that is behind a picture generated by a computer and that to me is art.
For all X: X is art if someone buys it.
So M$ products are art? Hmm, hard to accept indeed.
I consider MS a work of art - don't you? If you don't consider their software worthy of the label, surely you consider that their business practises are?
In any case I think you intended to question the "if" part and not the "only if" - Doah!
It's all about the story behind the art object. If you have a lot of imagination and make up a very 'deep' story, you could sell a painting of goatse as art. :)
I thought we were computer nerds...not art * (insert favorite artist slang term here).
VD
Next question please.
Five hundred years from now, do you think someone will hang it on their wall, or wipe their ass with it?
What a crass thing to do. Take something creative and interesting, point the seething hordes of Slashdot at it so it breaks horribly and causes the creator lots of stress as her system administrators and bandwidth providers come down on her like a ton of bricks. Probable outcome? Yet another genuinely interesting project will disappear from the net for ever, trampled under the hooves of a flash mob with no real interest in the project.
Of course computers can produce interesting and stimulating images. Consider the Mandelbrot set, for example, or a whole host of other functions which are highly sensitive to their inputs. Did Benoit Mandelbrot 'draw' or 'create' the Mandelbrot set image? Of course not. It is intrinsic in the concept of number, even though it required powerful computers to render it in any detail. Is it art? Human beings respond to it as if it was art.
If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck it's a duck. The Mandelbrot set is art (and so are pictures automatically taken by the Hubble Telescope) because we respond to them as art. So is the output of Katharina Nussbaumer's program which you have been so thoughtless as to destroy.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I think the "Fractal Art Manifesto" http://www.fractalus.com/info/manifesto.htm is a good reference and could easily be extended to other instances of computer generated art.
Marcel
Can't someone develope an application that querys googles image function, compare results and create an original picture. The picture should be based on similarities among the result.
but the computer program that created it might be.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well, seeing as most of their software exhibits 'prior art'.
about "Art is in the eye of the beholder"?
Dashboard Widgets
Could you call the smoking pile of twisted, melted, metal and plastic on the floor--at one time their server--art?
read about omnius prime's art in 'the battle of corrin' - it's a laugh .. then again, erasmus' viscera ikebana are super cool
Everything and nothing is art... this doubly so!
A better question would be:
Is it inspirational art?
Is it decorative art?
Is it bad art?
And then those who subjectively think it's art can discuss this...
-shrug-
Could a bot making a collage out of pictures found on internet Picture of the internet be art? Beware this is uncensored pictures from the net (can, and due to the charakteristiks of the net often do, contain pron etc..)
I think art might be less about intent than it is about effect.
If you ask several art critics to talk about the meaning of a piece, they'll each give a different answer, and all of the answers will likely differ from what the artist himself intended. Art exists in the mind of the beholder, and it can exist differently in each mind.
An observer will imbue a work with his own meaning, and judge it on the merits he perceives.
Therefore, a picture generated by a computer, though it were done with little or no human input, might still be thought by someone to be beautiful or interesting. If an observer thinks it's art, then it has fullfilled the function of art, and I'm happy to call it art.
It is. But it's crap.
Look under "3D" (what a piece of crap, it's "renders", the images are flat!) in any porn gallery. Mostly it looks worse than plastic dolls having sex.
As someone who's got absolutely no qualifications in art, I feel well qualified to offer my opinion on this matter.
;)
To my mind the question "Is computer generated art art?" is entirely the wrong way of looking at it. Why? Because you don't *make* art, you percieve it. Anything can be art. My dog can make art. How it's made isn't important.
Sure, you can make art with the specific intent of making it. You can also intend to make art and fail.. and you can make art when you didn't intend to. The critical aspect that makes something art is how it's percieved. Does it make you stop and think? Yes? Then it's probably art.
I wouldn't suggest that, say, an empty coke can is art.. not if I saw one lying in the street. But if I saw one nailed to the wall of a museum, I might stop and think about who did that, and why - it'd make me stop and think about an everyday object in a different light. And yes, this can happen accidentally - sometimes something completely random will catch your eye - the shape of a cloud in the sky, or the way the sunlight reflects off the side of a building, or any of a zillion other things.. and personally, I would say that can equally be art. Art is where you find it.
To summerize then, the answer to the question of "Yes, but is it art?" is "Do you think it's art?"
So. That's that question settled. No need to thank me, it's my pleasure. Some riches and fame would be appreciated though.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
For all X: X is art if someone buys it of one's own free will.
Amazing how Microsoft got involved in this discussed too.
Is this art? A human designed the algorithms and the structures of the images involved with artistic intent. The images themselves were generated entirely by a computer and random number generator.
Using tools to assist a human generating art doesn't disqualify the product as art in itself. Adding randomness doesn't disqualify it either, as at least one famous piece shows (in 'qualified' opinion, anyway).
The line is more blurred than you suggest, I think.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
whether or not a painting made by a baby is art, or whether a painting by one of those elephants who can paint is art. it all depends on the point of view. im sure to the parent/trainer it is but to the rest of us, it just looks like crap.
My name's not "Art"! Stop calling me that!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
If the question isn't being asked disingenuously then it's being asked ignorantly in my opinion. Fart is deliberately created in every aspect. The intricacies of a Pollock only appear random to those who choose not to really see. The randomly generated odors created by typogenerator are just that - random. There is no engagment of fartist and/or observer, there is no attempt to generate an emotional response, there is no meaning, no soul. 99.99% of the time the question "Is it fart?" is simply a statement by the asker of the question that they have no concept of what fart is. The only question that ever makes any sense at all is "is it good fart or bad fart?", a question that is patently inapplicable to typogenerator.
I remember when the Saatchi fire happened, and with all the damaged caused... I wondered if the firefighters had put out the fire, walked around to inspect the mess and for one of them to say "But is it art?". That thought makes me chuckle everytime.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
http://www.gwizdala.art.pl/a403/rgbrays/translator _max.php
Since everyone was debating what art is, and can a computer do it, I've decided to go for the single definitive source about this "art" thing. The dictionary. To be precise, the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. So, here it is:
Main Entry: 2art
Pronunciation: 'ärt
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French, from Latin art-, ars -- more at ARM
1 : skill acquired by experience, study, or observation
. Can a computer gain a skill by experience, study or observation? Not yet. So, no on this definition.
2 a : a branch of learning: (1) : one of the humanities (2) plural : LIBERAL ARTS b archaic : LEARNING, SCHOLARSHIP
Nope.
3 : an occupation requiring knowledge or skill
The computer program doesn't have knowledge or skill. ( the programmer might have, so the program might be art but the output isn't).So nope.
4 a : the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced b (1) : FINE ARTS (2) : one of the fine arts (3) : a graphic art
The computer isn't conscious. So nope.
5 a archaic : a skillful plan b : the quality or state of being artful
Nope.
6 : decorative or illustrative elements in printed matter
The output of a computer program can be decorative and can be printed. Therefore, the output is art.
So, there. The answer from the definitve source. The output of a computer program can be art.
"As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig.
Some enterprising guy once bought out a set of composing cards. With these and a die, an unskilled person could use randomness to compose an aria in the style of Mozart. Apparently Mozart himself bought a copy and was delighted by it.
I could just open Paint, draw three lines and a circle, and call that art. No one can tell me it's no art, because that's my opinion. I can decide what is art for me and what is not... Actually, this reply is art. What are you going to say to that!?
The only quesiton of art is "Is it good or bad art"
This question is inapplicable to typo generator.
Implies: Typo generator is not art.
Contradiction with line one which states that the question "Is this art" is an invalid question.
That "be patient" next to the generate button is an understatement
Sure it's art - and the programmer is the artist.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
SIEZURE INDUCER
Left at that people would say, "Anyone can do that!"
The punch line is that after the artist's death someone did some research on the item. It turns out it was not manufactured by anyone. It was a one of a kind hand crafted porcelain sculpture that happened to be in the shape of a urinal. If the same effort had been put forth to craft a dove taking flight or some "beautiful" subject the traditionalists would have appreciated the work as art.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Those who think "found objects" like unmade beds and urinals are a disgrace to the word "art" should check out the Stuckists.
From one of their manifestos: "Declaring a dead horse hung from the ceiling of a gallery not to be art is not racism or hatred of dead horses. It is a value judgement, and here on earth value judgements are of value."
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
In order to understand what it is to be considered art it is helpful to take a look at the process of creativity.
Consider the Bower Bird. During the mating season the male bower birds "create" a bower of pretty petals , butterfly wings, other shiny things and arranges them in an beautiful display. Experiments have been done for example where an observer moved items in the display while the male was out collecting other bits and pieces. Upon return the birds noticed the display had changed and replaced the items in there former positions. Female bower birds choose their male mate by choosing the bird whose bower she finds most appealing.
In other words she is picking a mate that she considers to have the most appealing bower - and hence its creativity.
Can the bower birds be considered artists? I think that they certainly exhibit most of the properties we associate with human-made art.
We can ask the same questions of Computer generated artwork. Does the computer have an idea of what "it" thinks is appreciable ? Can it be called a creation and could others recognise creative processes involved in the work?
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
T his A rt!
If it looks good, yes.
It is what IT is, of course!
First, someone has already pointed out that to a great degree art is subjective. Still, that leaves room for common sense and good taste to play a part.
//e), something that I had wanted to do anyway so it worked out well in the end (well, except for the F).
I also found this interesting as it applies directly to a personal experience I had many years ago. My Freshman year in highschool (1986 I believe) I had to take art class. Being none to excited about it, I did the only thing a true nerd could do; I convinced my art teacher to let me create computer genereated art. She bought off on the idea and was delighted with the outcome. Unfortunately, being that she's an art teacher, she was also bi-polar (along with several other probable diagnoses) and come semester end, she changed my grade on the project from an A to an F. Anyway, my "computer art" gave me a chance to learn a great deal about graphics programming on my computer at the time (an Apple
Is Bill, Bill?
Is water wet?
Does Slash Dot?
Is this thingy here, mine?
Could you post this again later?
Answer:
Art is Art
Computer's randomness ability does provide two useful possibilities: (1) for artistic creations; (2) for testing a system (which can be human too).
As a second-year computer science student in Shanghai, I recently found the possibility that the computer may well be an automated system that tests a human's language translation capability. We already know that the computer can't confidently analyze a natural language sentence N to its internal machine representation I due to lack of the enormous and chaotic (actually illogic) real world interpretation rules. But if the computer already gets a machine representation I for a certain sentence meaning, it can well know *all the possible correct ways to express I in a natural language* based on enough symbolic transformation rules. So, it could show a human trainee the Chinese output C of I, and let him to come up with an English translation E from C, and finally, determine if E was ANY of all the possible correct English translations {E'} from I. Of course this doesn't necessarily involve a complete search -- there are much heuristic information between I and E.
The object of art is the object reformed deliberately and informed by our collective cultural experiences through the intent of the artist. It is this intent which forms the "energy" of the art itself.
Through art we relive the energy of the subject of the art form vicariously and that energy, according to all thinkers on art, from Goethe to Berenson, is the primary source of aesthetic pleasure.
Can a computer randomly generate art? Of course not. Beauty? Maybe. But not art. Beauty can be found in nature, in randomness, in chaos. Art is found in culture, in purpose, and in order (even when it may appear chaotic).
-Tom
Computer programs are patentable because they have a "tecnhical effect" (OK, you'll have to forget that the meaning of technical effect is pretty specific in this case, but the various PTO's seem to have managed that part). The effect in this case is Art.
If one-click is patentable (both the implementation and the output), then Art is patentable.
Woo Hoo!
I think not. What my dog creates isn't art.
You ask "is IT art?"
I think the question is "wrong", since this is art of course, but the artist is the programmer.
Also you ask "Does anyone know of other candidates for computer-created art?"
This guy, for example, has a wonderful gallery of computer-generated art. The system he usesis used both to teach programming in a visual way, and to create some great art (some of which was exposed in various museums).
At least the images presented in the article do not constitute are, but graphic design. It's like instant Create-A-Logo.
What does this algorithm offer contemporary art that it didn't have before? Nothing. At some point it would be nice if computers could generate something to pass as art, but no art critic will ever let it happen without a fight.
And for those of you using Duchamp's R Mudd Urinal as a basis for comparing what is art or not should step back into the 21st century. That piece was conceptualized and made about 80 years ago and if you take a contemporary art history class there is really no argument about it's status, place, or influence. Comparing the urinal to this Logo design prog would be like saying well "if COBOL is a programming language then so is kanji."
in the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. .... as such, one should regard the descriptions of the controversy on the wall of the museum as at least as much a part of the "art" than the urinal itself.
The most bizarre part of the visit was standing behind a group of "cultured" people discussing whether the inclination of the piece served to detach it from its function so that its true beuty of form could be seen.... to me, it was obvious that Duchamp's main purpose in creating the piece was to create the controversy around it
He succeeded. Brilliantly. The shape of the object had (IMHO) very little to do with it.
And the comments (apparently completely serious) I overheard show that we still need that kind of challenge.
Is slashdotting an art??
Maybe not funny, but troll ? A waisted point of moderation. And a shit thing to do for something which is not troll. Z
Insofar as computer hardware and software cannot yet deal with the human condition, ie the range of hope, pain, despair, and joy, then art will be outside their capability.
Period.
I believe this is a quote from Andy Warhol, someone who certainly challenged the boundaries of art.
I was rereading something about him yesterday. He was shipping a show of his art, consisting of silk screened boxes that were exact copies of consumer packages, such as Brillo soap pad boxes, and cereal boxes. Canadian custums wanted to charge a levy on them, because they considered them manufactured goods, which the Gallery refused to pay. The gallery owner sneered something along the lines of "This isn't art. The artist has just taken images and added his name to them."
Andy Warhol's reply was "But I don't sign them."
You should keep in mind that when he died he was worth hundreds of million of dollars.
For example, if the computer has these facts: (1) programming language is similar to natural language; (2) programming language has a writing aid tool called IntelliSense (as in Visual Studio); Then the computer should be able to conclude: (3) IntelliSense may be applicable to natural langauge as well. This conclusion is exactly LingoX, an invention I made. See http://www.mail-archive.com/mt-list@eamt.org/msg00 756.html
What is art, and what constitutes art are two different questions.
Art, IMHO, can be derived from:
Art-theta = (effort * skill) * beholder^(effort * skill);
This means, that the more skilled something is, and the more effort, and the apprecation, gives rise to acclaimed art.
If an art piece is an a gallery of people who do not appreciate it, is it still art?
Computer art is not random, no more than considering using pre-tubed paints a random expression.
Pollock even asked himself at one point, is this shit art. Not the exact phrase I grant you.
A computer programmer has *GIVEN* the computer a pre-understanding of art. Wether is be a mathematical symmetry or description of a natural lighting occurance (gradient), or a colour based selection and using familar shaped (typography)
You typing the letter is like you doing a paint by numbers using ready made paints.
Computer art is not different to normal art. It is a lot harder to program a computer to produce something unique with a given input (and enter also variables of beauty).
If you had so make a picutre using the word apple, you could do it in so many ways. Not write apple, but paint an apple. A computer wired to google images, with an oil paint filter installed could do this also... with more random and haphazard results.
Anyway.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Yes, computer generated art is art. Just like any form of art, is art. There's nothing relovutionary or special going on here, and your computer itself is not an artist. Neither is the code you wrote. You are the artist, and the code your wrote is a self-made tool, and the output is art which should be accredited to yourself.
11*43+456^2
Art is any piece of crap created by an "artist." I realise the definition is circular, but it's the best definition there is. Think about it, when I crap, it's not art. But when an "artist" craps on a cross, it's art.
Thus, if the program used by the computer to create the crap, was itself created by an artist, then it's art. If it was created by anyone else, it's not.
Luckly for the programer, it's quite easy to claim to be an artist, because no objective talent is required.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Randomness is VALUE! Computer's randomness ability does provide two useful possibilities: (1) for artistic creations; (2) for testing a system (which can be human too). As a second-year computer science student in Shanghai, I recently found the possibility that the computer may well be an automated system that tests a human's language translation capability. We already know that the computer can't confidently analyze a natural language sentence N to its internal machine representation I due to lack of the enormous and chaotic (actually illogic) real world interpretation rules. But if the computer already gets a machine representation I for a certain sentence meaning, it can well know *all the possible correct ways to express I in a natural language* based on enough symbolic transformation rules. So, it could show a human trainee the Chinese output C of I, and let him to come up with an English translation E from C, and finally, determine if E was ANY of all the possible correct English translations {E'} from I. Of course this doesn't necessarily involve a complete search -- there are much heuristic information between I and E.
I can't say is art.
p tual1wv.jpg :)
Art is about provoking toughts or feelings on purpose. Had that computer any intentionality?
Also Art has nothing to do with beauty. Think Rap, think francis bacon.
One photo I often show about art being able to provoke thought is this: http://img157.exs.cx/img157/2361/queeselarteconce
as you see is not specially beautiful either
MondoL
Why slashdot, why do you take all the good things away from me?
First you tell me to take a look at this really interesting website, that generates things that looks like art. Then, to my surprise, the index page loads only to find the rest of the site has crashed!
Why must you tease me so?
SIGFAULT
In my opinion, art is art independent of who creates it. But more importantly, this commentary is just like that which claims there can never be AI because no matter what a machine does it was created by people and thus people are the brains, and [blah blah blah] ... . I've never bought into that idea. I guess it's for the same reason that I don't think a parent is necessarily reponsible for something his child does. For example, it's entirely possible that a kid brought up in a very good family who was cared for and loved can become a killer. Parents' fault?
So why is it necessary that art created by a machine be related back to the machine's human creators at all? Who cares where the machine came from?
-mg.
I made this paintbrush from a stick and a bundle of hair. All I did was manipulate the stick, never touching the bristles, let alone the paper. Was I surprised at the beauty of the painting the bristles made! Sure, without me the brush would never exist, let alone the painting. But now that the brush is made, does it need me anymore to make art? Is the painting even art?
The existence of the painting, as art, without humans to look at it, is left as an exercise to the reader. A dull, familiar exercise. More of an existential dancercise is whether Tillie is an artist, or just Bowman Hastie.
--
make install -not war
As a creative person, I belive art to be a form of communication. If the work is not communicating anything, (and by that I mean an emotion) it is but decoration which in itself is not bad yet certainly not art.
Digit0
I did a self-study semester in college on the issue of computer generated "fine art", and came to the conclusion that for all the amazing things it can do, it really is still just a fancy art tool, like a paintbrush.
We tend to empower complex systems like computers and automobiles with human-like qualities like "crankiness" or "creativity". In reality, though, they're still just complex tools. TypoGenerator was, after all, programmed by a human being, as was Google. And any good programmer will tell you they consider good code art. Therefore, your work is really a collaboration with them, using a network of programmed paintbrushes.
If it can be appreciated by one or more humans as art, then it is art.
There is music sung by whales that people regard as art. No matter how much people disparage the works of the minimalists, many regard their work as art. There is a song chanted from the top of mosques at prayer time that no person there would consider music, but an ethnomusicologist I know appreciated it enough to record it.
Just because these things are art to some does not mean they are art to everyone. That's fine; we're all different. However, if something is art to someone, then it is at least on some level, art.
Anyone can make are but is it good? And good isn't necessarily subjective. There are many means to evaluate art that rely on specific criteria such as composition, technical execution, etc. Context of a piece is extremely important. There's a big difference between Duchamp pulling a "Fountain" for the first time versus someone sticking an empty garbage bag in a gallery and calling it art in 03.
no sleepy!
In the same way that photography is art.
"Is computer generated art, art?"
Doh. Yes, it's computer generated art.
Didn't that answer your question?
It's a division of art. When looking in a dictionary, it doesn't seem like art necessarily need to be human-made; that's just one of the definitions. It can also mean "High quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value". So I certainly believe this is art using that definition. Computer generated art. If a picture from ASCII text or whatever is art? Well, answering "no" to that just because you think it's silly would be like saying abstract art isn't art because you think it looks silly.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
as previously reviewed on /., paul graham's book hackers & painters covers this topic.
i'm a coder and my wife is an artist, so we wage this debate on a semi-constant basis... i say code can be poetry.
is art, including computer art.
Whether or not it's appreciable or worthy of splendor is an entirely different argument.
never forget that Art is expression.. anything that expresses human emotion in a creative and original way, by using methods such as music, painting, poetry, graphic design, anything you can think of, is art..
i almost think of art as anything that is therapeutic for your emotions..
but also never let us forget that about 85-95% of all art has been exploited and used for many many evil purposes..
i live with an amazing graphic designer.. i've never seen anyone like him.. if i didn't consider him an artist, i would definitely be belittling him.. see for yourself..
www.thebury.net
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
Computers have done to the art world what cameras first did when Kodak made them cheap enough for everyone to afford: flood the art world with crap.
no sleepy!
The best art asks the question "what is art?"
Of course, thats elitest bullshit.
Art is something pretty that hangs on the wall. Or possibly, its a statue. No need to get existential about it.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
Personally, I consider the circuits I design to be artwork. visually enjoyable, technically witty, and fundamentally useful.
I do security
the coral p2p cache seems to have its limits, too:
when loading the page http://typogenerator.net.nyud.net:8090/, the following message comes:
Error: 403 Forbidden
Error when attempting to use the Coral Content Distribution Network (http://www.coralcdn.org/).
The hostname specified in the Coralized URL is currently over its hourly quota. Please try back later.
Server CoralWebPrx/0.1.12 (See http://coralcdn.org/) at 130.37.198.243:8090
Only morons moderate based on a sig.
Nope, still not! It will take more than that to make IT be art.
I think this is a perfectly valid question and one that is interesting to debate
/. will tend to see the question itself as stupid, because tech nerds tend to focus on the realm of reality. Will this processor work at this speed? What happens when I cross these two wires? That sort of thing. Anything that is firmly rooted in philosophy and can be actually demonstrably shown to have no bearing or use in the real world will be rejected as "stupid" pretty much outright.
:)
I think people are largely bashing the topic because they disagree with you on this point.
"Is X art?" is one of those eternal questions, asked in every philosophy or art class arould the world, and the answer now is the same as it always has been, namely, "Who frickin' cares?"
The question itself is what your average slashdot reader would call "frickin' stupid". Unless you define the term "art" such that everybody agrees on the definition, then the term is subjective and as such whether X is art or not depends on the person answering the question. Whether X is art or not is an opinion, and thus there's really nothing to debate. So all debates on the topic, while mildly interesting, as about as useful as debating whether or not there is a god of some sort. Fun to do, perhaps, but utterly useless in the long run because you always have the same argument.
Because of this, tech nerds like those that populate
You can spend all night arguing whether X is art or not, but in the end you won't have an answer, you won't have agreement, and you'll have essentially wasted your time. If you find that sort of useless argument to be fun, then by all means, enjoy. But your average tech nerd doesn't find that sort of argument fun for very long, because it's one of those arguments you can have forever. There's no definite answer. No right or wrong. Neither side is clearly correct.
Look at usenet or any forum. Endless debates on useless topics like these. However the cast of characters doing the arguing keeps changing. About 7 or 8 years is the most I've seen anybody able to argue in these sort of debates, after that you give up on it from sheer exasperation. Most people burn out even faster. Usually it's from the age of about 21 to 25 or so that are prime useless debate years, I feel.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
http://lyzrd.com/publish/ proves beyond a doubt that computer created art is art. All computer art had to have a human behind it, somewhere. This art in particular had a little more human behind it than "computer generated art" per se.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
.. but only if you have bothered to educate yourself first in what has gone before. I would, in fact, say that 'good art' and 'good science' are equally easy to recognize.
Here are some criteria that I would consider pertinent to the question 'is it art?', or indeed, 'is it good art?'.
1. Art is communication - it should say something pertinent, and the best way to say something that is pertinent is to advance the existing discourse.
2. Art adheres to, or breaks, existing aesthetic conventions.
3. Art should stand up to peer review.
I think that in all of these categories TypoGenerator scores pretty low. The results are tedious. Anyone who thinks otherwise should get out and go visit their local art museum, or go read one of Gombrich's books on the nature of Art.
Or, yes.
It depends on what you think "art" is.
Something I just found the other day: Electric Sheep, a screensaver and distributed animated art generator.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Art is art is art.
Whether it's created by a human, a wildebeest, a colony of insects, a microbe or a computer.
If it has the art nature it is art.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
If it's intended to be art, it is art.
If you really want to see some amazing art, head to:
www.deviantart.com
I'm completely addicted. These people have such talent that it absolutely stuns me sometimes. There's no possible definition but art.
Allison Okamura's Robot Actuators and Sensors class at Johns Hopkins had to create ArtBots (robots that create art) as their final projects last semester.
b ots.html . html
Check it out:
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/audio-video/art
http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2004/13dec04/13artbot
Ditto sunspots, seacosts, mountains, and certain purely mathematical constructs such as Julia sets.
Does that make mother nature an artist?
Answer yes or no, either answer is legitimate and supportable.
The debate shouldn't be "is it art" but "do the creations deserve any kind of intellectual property rights, and if so, who holds these rights?" That's a question future courts will wrestle with.
I agree that art, like fashion, is in the eye of the beholder. What you see as artful or beautiful is that to you.
I also would liken this to found art. The computer creates it. We find/see it. Then when we like it, we show it to others to see and enjoy.
In modern art, anything is art. Throw a frame (literally or metaphorically) and boom, gen-u-wine ART. All that is required is defining the framework, which is as simple as pointing at something you did/said/excreted and say "that's art".
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Slightly OT, but this guy is brilliant.
It's art if you think it's art.
Art is not art because the artist says so. Art is art because the viewer feels it's art.
When the artist says it's art, he speaks only for himself.
Normally I just let things like this go, but since it's the title of the thread, it's sitting there in the title bar of Firefox glaring at me, and since the whole article is a gigantic troll anyway, I will risk getting modded down as Offtopic.
The comma in the title is completely unnecessary. It should read "Is computer-created art art?" The way it is written indicates that you're sking someone named Art a question, except that the question that precedes it is not a complete sentence.
Sorry, but it's a pet peeve.
If someone uses a program like Painter and uses it to "clone" a photograph, ie, copy the photo's color with a "computer brush", is that an original artwork or a "cleverly manipulated photograph"?
Here's a reg-free link to the AARON trial download...
God this is such crap. How lame is Slashdot going to get before we just go away?
If an artist is nothing more than the means by which information is transformed into a new medium (thought->paper, emotion->sound, random data->JPG) then why should anyone or anything be rewarded for what is essentially performing the function of a tool?
Why should the work of Michaelangelo be "Priceless", yet the sketchings of an NYC street artist fixed at $15? Surely the provenance is different, but beyond the origins there should be no discernable difference in importance.
So then why should we pay "Artists" for producing their art? If the expression "Writers Write. Painters Paint. Singers Sing" holds true, then these tools are simply performing their function and thus shouldn't be singled out for deserving praise or reward above any other.
So what if a particular tool is adept at producing a result you find either pleasing or revolting? Is your subjective taste, or the taste of a majority, enough to qualify Art as Art? If I am the only person who sees the beauty in an object, am I all the more rich for holding a truly unique perspective? Is my perspective then, itself an art?
I more interesting question would be Is it copywritable? Has anyone ever considered writing a program that would generate a set of musical scores.
the simplest of which would be a "song" that had one not. for each of the audiable notes on the western scale. The program would then start genearting different combinations of "songs" , perhaps removing
really simple ones from the final project. This way it might be possible to generate an electric file that contained all possible combinations of notes in western music. ( yes it would be huge anyone else want to do the math and figure out how huge? ). You could then publish and copywrite this electronic file. So no one could use your music you had written?
Think about it?
Christopher
Computer created art is considered to be art - not only by theory, but also by practice.
The Hungarian born Victor Vasarely's paintings are sold on the art market at a high price - and they can be found in the collections of large art galleries, museums around the world.
Victor Vasarely was one of the pioneers to use computer technology in the process of creating art.
His approach was very interesting and perfectly suitable to his style (based on geometry).
Vasarely used computers to create endless variations of pre-defined geometrical forms and colour combination, then he decided which ones to use for his artwork.
This way, he remained in complete control of what was his art, while computers gave him great deal of help to generate "ideas".
You can take a quick look at some of his artworks here , it will be obvious immediately how computers could take part in his art.
Here are three very basic questions that can be asked of any art and provide one test of the "worthiness" of that piece:
1. What was the artist trying to say?
2. How well the did artist say it?
3. Was it worth saying?
Got this from my Theatre 101 class back in 1993...
The concept of "Art" is defined as "trivial" at best. Since art is perceptual and often interpretted differently among various people, art can mean different things to anyone.
As a professional artist, I feel its necessary to respond to this article. My work has been featured in several calendars, published in newspapers, and even on the web. Throughout my life I was encouraged to draw and definitely showed my talents in school; progressing to a 5th-year, college-level course in 3 years because my instructor wanted to keep challenging me.
Some of my work is drawn by hand, processed, and used in a more polished version of the drawing on my computer. Some pieces are drawn completely on the system, however, still drawn from scratch using the tools in various graphics programs.
Clip-art is an insult. Anyone who uses it and claims they're a graphics expert, just needs to be bitch-slapped.
My point is, art is something that can't be defined. Art can be used as a general term to specify one's practice as well. There's even a book called, "The Art of War". So in my humble opinion, art can be the feeling one would achieve from appreciating work for a reason unrelated to the immediate cause. An architect builds a home for a family to keep them dry, cool, and safe, but others would notice the archways and contours of the curved walls. Based on this concept, art is what helps define us as human.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
what about music? i'm working on a music composition project that uses genetic algorithms. it is creating it's own music based on common classical music theory. i think that the music it creates is it's own art. a human doesn't need to do it for it to be art.
Spiral out. Keep going...
People should be prepared for these floods since anybody can have his 15 minutes of fame at any time in the Internet....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
One of the boundries seems to be the amount of human interaction. The pros think that only humans can create art.
But even that they tend to poo-poo at. Is a 3d rendered image art? How about these. From my perspective, some of these are extremely visually appealing, and no less art than a painting on the wall. A painter might disagree.
Music is also an artform. I've had musicians who state that the industry is going to hell, because nobody makes "real" music anymore. Computers add enhancements to an artist's voice, intruments, etc. A lot of the instruments are synth.
Certainly if they don't agree that electronic-assisted music is real, they wouldn't agree on something wholly computer generated.
In my opinion though, art is a result of both the care that has going into its creation, and the visual/audible/etc impact of the final presentation. "Canned" music artists that can't sing without enhancement nor play an instrument are posers. The machines are just making a lack of real skill more entertaining.
A band that gets on the stage, puts love and skill into their work, they're artists. But then, an electronica band that puts heart-and-soul into a real show are to me also artists.
A machine that does a painting on its own... it's not an artist, it's not art. The code behind a machine that renders realistic original paintings... that code to me is the art. The machine is just running through instructions and choices to produce a piece of visual output falling within certain parameters. The actual code put into the piece is a result of skill, passion, and in the end is truely a work of intellectual art.
The guys that do 3d renderings. Maybe they can't draw worth a damn with a pencil. But while I'm decent with a 3d program many put me to shame. The end result is still a product of skill and passion.
I think that to qualify as art you much have all or most of these requirements:
There are artists, entertainers, and people that are both. One is not always the other, but those who are both are truely gifted individuals.
I have a fuller discussion of the theory here, as part of a larger discussion demonstrating why the entire idea of "expression" in copyright theory has been destroyed. But for this post, and in summary, I will try to use the current copyright system, instead of destroying it.
First, this is still on topic, because while we don't agree what art is and we never will, most definitions contain a creativity requirement. Copyright also contains a creativity requirement, and it is at least a little more concrete to discuss creativity in a copyright context than an art context.
To make the issue even starker, I refer you to the Random Art page, where random art is created from scratch. (This also avoids one legal answer for TypoGenerator, that it has no copyright because it is infringing on the source images. That kind of ducks the issue.) Random Art is a program that generates an image purely from a random number generator; once the program is written, there is no additional input.
Thus, there are two questions, which I believe do fairly directly pertain to the "is it art?" issue:
- Is this creative enough to qualify for copyright? There are two conflicting answers here:
- If this qualifies for copyright, who gets it? This sharpens the previous question all the more... there is really only one candidate in the Random Art case, the program owner. Yet, if creativity is a process, not a result, for any given image he applied no creativity at all; in fact the site periodically cycles images and I'd imagine it is a fully automated process by now. So by copyright criteria, he probably doesn't hold the copyright; he applied all his creativity in the creation of the generation program, which of course he fully owns. On the other hand, if creativity is an adjective applied to a final work, clearly the output itself is copyrightable; many things of lesser visual creativity are as well.
This sort of thing doesn't just raise questions about art, it strikes to the heart of our hundreds-of-years-old way of conceptualizing "works" in general; it is one step beyond the usual meaning of the venerable "what is art" question. Our definition of work is too intimately tied with the physical world and breaks down completely in the modern computer era. This is just one such issue, but it is one of the rather sharp examples.- No, a computer can not be creative, at least in the legal sense. (Forget AI for the moment, it's not on the table right now anyhow and the problem is hard enough as it is!)
- Yes, on the grounds that if a human produced the exact same image, it would fully and unquestionably qualify for copyright.
How to resolve it? Is calling some creative merely a description of the process, not the result as we would normally think of it? My full answer is in the essay above, but given the ground rules for this post of staying in the current system instead of my own ethical system, I don't have an answer for this. We'd have to wait for a judge.As an interesting side note, I note the Random Art program owner is now offering his prints for sale, so there is a commercial component at play here too. It technically doesn't affect the copyrightability or art question either way, but it would get a judge's attention, don't you thing?
(If this interests you, I encourage you to check out the full section on this issue.)
Gallery of Computation is also very interesting way of generating "art" of a different kind.
Art is the psychic unfolding of the soul. Computers don't have souls,... yet.
By definition.
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. At the Smithsonian museum of natural history, there is a large rock intricately carved by water channels that could just as easily be displayed at the Hirshorn. Nevertheless, this is a question that can be objectively answered (in the case of the rock, it was not designed), and is answered every day as courts consider whether a death is really accidental and archaeologists consider whether a flat pointy rock is really an arrowhead.
Of course, if you are a philosophical naturalist, you believe that this universe is all there is, and every event is purely the outworking of the laws of physics. In you take that position, then nothing is art, and there is no true intelligence - just the appearance of it. For the word "intelligence" means to choose between - which can't happen when every action is determined by physical law (whether deterministic or stochastic).
While recognizing intelligent design is difficult for many, an even more difficult problem is recognizing beauty. After all, art can portray both beauty and ugliness: Tolkiens epic involves both Elves and Orcs. But is beauty subjective, as Voltaire proclaimed? Or is true beauty an objective reality, and differences in its perception due to variations in the loss of our faculties for perceiving it?
In case it isn't clear, based on my definitions, the typogenerator is obviously artificial, and hence it is objectively art. Perhaps what people are really unsure about is whether the pictures it generates are beautiful, ugly, or just random? I would give my opinion, but the site has been slashdotted.
http://www.robertspahr.com/art/current/#crufts CRUFTS: Fully automated scripts generate a cruft image based on my algorithms using source images harvested from the internet. Crufts are digital images generated from previous media found on the internet, hence I think of them as "meta-media."
If you have to ask that question, then you aren't qualified to ask that question.
An analogy here is: is music created on a Casio keyboard, or a synthesizer, music? An art gallery owner friend of mine once said, "If you cannot sell it, it ain't art." His statement will surely be rejected by those parents who frame their children's doodles, because to them they are priceless art. ArtRage is a freely distributed graphics software which is capable of simulating oil paint brushes, and I have used it to create about 30 "virtual oil paintings" on my blog at: http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/. You can see for yourself and determine if they are art.
Sun and Fun
Art is something that has both expressive and descriptive power. It is another language that most of us share, that attempts to convey what the artist is seeing or feeling.
Computer-generated 'art' is therefore not 'art', in that sense, unless you want to make sure that the software passes a Turing Test first, unless the auther of the software wants to try to make the claim that the software is espressing *their* vews.
Now, it *could* be argued that computer-generated art is an Art - that is, and "occult" Art, like scrying (looking in a crystal ball, pool of water, whatever), and using that to look within yourself.
Of course, in that case, it's *your* art, not the developer's or the software's.
mark
No such thing as art there are only artists
'Accidental' non-manmade creations can be art, like a sunset. the sunset is art if someone views it and decides it so. Manmade items created not for art can later be decided to be so, like old railroad cars. Art created for one meaning can gain entirely separate meaning, like che guevara's picture.
whether something is art or not is only relative when it's being appreciated, and has nothing to do with it's creation.
this cat&girl comic says it pretty well
by definition. Otherwise, it would not be called Art. The question is really, can computers create Art?
The question isn't whether or not it is art. Everything IS art.
The question is simply how good or how bad the art is.
The answer is of course subjective. I think the art in question is not important. It breaks no new ground. It makes no statement. Aesthetically it has been done before. So I'd say it isn't very good art. Not bad, just nothing special.
However, it is art.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
There almost should be different, exclusive terms for these two forms of art. Computers will easily be able to understand our rules of aesthetics for generating decorative art forms, and in fact, computers should be able to outdo humans in that area because they will consistently follow the rules, keeping personal eccentricities out of it Assuming, of course, that those rules are good and up-to-date (and that's a problem too in that the rules will reflect shifts in styles and visual trends and will have to be updated... by a human.)
Until the day comes that computers can think for themselves, can contemplate their own existence, can look up at the stars and wonder what the world is all about then they will not be able to create communicative art forms. Don't expect a computer to generate the next Guernica or The Persistence of Memory off a set of rules.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Photographer Edward Weston wrote in his notebooks that the thing that is created by the process of art is an artifact. I think that's what we're seeing in the output of a computer: an artifact. That doesn't diminish the artifact's power to evoke an emotional response, but rather makes the distinction that the art is in the process of creation, not in the thing made. You could probably say that the art, in this case, is in the programming that allowed the computer to make the artifact in the first place.
This is old hat people
Basically the art the computer generates alone is not considered art, however the process that was created or programmed along with the outcome is considered art.
Art is an expression, computers cannot express (yet) so therefore they cannot produce art.
However if a computer had A.I. and it created an art piece it would be considered art.
Isn't the program itself art, not what it creates?
These applets are quite beautiful.
you had me at #!
I can't tell you what art is, but I know it when I see it.
especially on a machine. the randomness isn't very random and can be as tricky as the conditions of photographing a child or the inconsistency of stone or wood in sculpture... or the strangeness of paint on certain surfaces, etc., the odd splatter of a paintbrush or air nozzle, and so on.
i guess my deal with computer art and i do computer art is the effort involved. any jackass can make a pile of bricks, even a pretty pile... but a guy without arms... that's suffering... that's work... that moves.
i like the person up thread who remarked that it's not important whether it's art, is it good art... that's the question. everything can be art, but is it good? what constitutes good art? what raises the bar of achievement?
achievement can be conceptual. sometimes the achievement is the attitude. etc etc.
computer programs can definitely be art. and be good art. for me tho, the goodness only comes from the that time spent close to that metal that makes it worthy and not the toss off the week.
my 2%,
m.
Therefore, computer-generated art can be considered good art at least to the extent it manifests these two qualities.
In order for it to be accurate, the algorithm producing the art should have a model of the change of observer state desired. This might include a model of human emotions, common memories, sensory associations and all that other subjective stuff.
To be precise, the resulting work should move all observers in the same direction to similar degree.
Winamp Advanced Visualisation Studio (AVS) is a far better example of computer generated art than Typogenerator. AVS runs sound patterns through user-created presets to form animations and interesting visuals that move with music.
g ory=11
The difference between the two is that human input for Typogenerator is very small. An AVS preset needs very precise input, some having hundreds of lines of code (and a human-created music track) to get them to look the way they do. It's not just code that goes into making a preset though, just about anyone could make a reasonable preset in about 2 minutes with no coding skills whatsoever.
The AVS community is cranking out hundreds of great presets. the complexity and originality and variety of these presets is amazing even considering how versatile the tool is. Picking up the "language" is easy as every single preset is completely open and editable, mixable with other presets etc.
The other great winamp vis plugin is the slightly dated Milkdrop, which unlike AVS is 3d accelerated and is much less complex. Because most presets were writen before 2002, it runs extremely smoothly even at ultra high resolutions and framerates.
Load up a song in winamp and go to preferences > visualizations to choose/configure a visualization plugin. ctrl-shift-k is the shortcut to start the plugin.
Get thousands of presets for milkdrop at http://www.milkdrop.co.uk/
and tens of thousands of AVS presets at http://winamp.com/plugins/browse.php?ctype=P&cate
sorry
It doesn't matter how the thing was made. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter where or even how it's displayed.
Does whatever it is invoke a feeling in you when you see/hear/touch/taste it?
If so, it's art.
where's the artist? can i see they haven't bathed in a week? can i see that they forgot to eat cause they were so consumed that their answering machine is full of messages they haven't returned.
good science and engineering is filled with this same passion i think. sure, you don't have to be that to be the best and sometimes that leads to bad science, engineering, and art too... but i'd put my bet down on passion first.
m.
(forgot to add this to the above. pardon the coffee stains on my post.)
Personally, I'd say nothing that cannot appreciate art can create art. Which is exactly what seperates the Mondriaans of this world from kids with a ruler and some colored markers. It's a definition that allows for a broad definition of art and also tells you something about the difference of opinion when assigning value to art. Using this definition, I'd say the pictures created by a computer at this moment in time are not art, since there are no computers that can appreciate it, not can the system itself do that. Once we consider automated system as our equals, at least in this respect, a computer -could- create art. Now, if someone wants to claim he considers this computer to be his equal in art appreciation and then goes on to claim that must mean the computer has created art, she's right. But only to the computer and that person. Only if a creator of art becomes accepted as an equal in art appreciation in a larger group, will people accept the creator as an artist in general. Hope this helps, greetings, Grismar.
A computer can produce art, but a computer cannot be an artist (at least for humans, yet). Art is something for its audience to appreciate. An artist has to understand what the audience will appreciate, then find something that will be appreciated. Computers have to be told what an audience will appreciate. However, computers can be fanastic at finding something that an audience will appreciate once they're told exactly what to look for.
Here, I wrote a Java applet for gravitational simulations, wrote another program to produce a bunch of parameters, and fed the simulator the parameters. I think the result is art, because the audience (me) appreciates it. The computer did most of the work (both writing the parameters and doing the simulation). But I'm the artist, because I'm the one who decided I appreciate it.
No. only paint and feces count as legitimate art media.
typoGenerator searches images.google for the text and creates a background from the found images, using randomly chosen effects. then it places the text, using random effects too. What about the copyright violation. I believe this is not like qouting some thing.
i have been making computer generated art with perl and povray for almost a decade. I've had a couple shows, but haven't really "taken off" yet..
Here are a few samples.
There are two basic camps to what art is: Asthetic art, that is, things that are pleasing to the senses, is one school for determining whether or not a thing is art. The more pleasing something is, the better the work is. Communicative art, that is, does the work say something to the observer, and how "universal" is what it is saying? The more important an idea it communicates, and the more universal the message, the better the work is. For my money, I tend go more for the communicative than the asthetic, but a combination of the two will leave me weak in the knees. Certain works of Shakespeare tend to hit me like a freight train - he managed to encapsulate, frequently, an essential truth about the human experience, and to do so beautifully more often than not.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Computer generated art is a subset of Generative Art. There are all manner of related technology and art theory issues.
g a2 003%20proceedings%20paper.pdf
And a lot of smart people already well into the topic...here are a few places to look if you want to really get into it seriously...
My paper "What is Generative Art..."
http://www.philipgalanter.com/pages/acad/media/
The site of the annual Generative Art conference with many more papers and so on...
http://www.generativeart.com/
Home of the generative art discussion list and many many related links...
http://www.generative.net/
jump in, the waters fine!
Phil
It is a CGI designed to look like an infinitely deep tree of static pages, each with unique content. The text is generated from a word frequency table based on a bunch of sample text I had lying around at the time, but picks "topic" words that it throws in more often and then adds punctuation at a normal-looking frequency. It looks normal enough that your brain tries to parse it, but just fails. Here's a sample.
Aaron
No. M$ products are being made to satisfy undemanding population. Therefor they are kitsch.
Forget about red herrings such as what you've seen in galleries, museums, newspapers, etc. The art world committed suicide about 50 years ago and it in itself no longer has any relation to art. What may be in museums, galleries, etc. is unimportant.
Instead ask yourself if you'd consider something a program (this holds especially true if you're a programmer) if a computer program created it for you. For instance suppose there was a web site where you typed in some keywords, for instance 'file, copy, image, lock, java' or 'ftp query perl string' and then the program created a working program. Would you be happy with it as a program?
Suppose it really was very cleverly done and brought a smile to your face. Would it then be a program? Suppose you realized that the code was actually better and more elegant than something that you might write. Would it then be a program? Complicate this by the knowledge that Art is considered to be something more than just the creation of something functional. Depending upon how much pride you take in your programming, whether you're happy with the most error-ridden software that you might steal from some web site, whether you're used to only the most elegant programming you will probably react differently. Then multiply the complexity of that by 100 or so and you'll have some idea as to whether computer generated art, photography, Marcel Duchamp, a street artist or Velasquez creates art. Maybe they all are.
In my senior year of high school, I pieced together a cg pic that my art teacher entered in local art museum's annual contest. I won best of show, and it was the only computer generated image entered. I got alot of nasty looks and remarks from the _real_ artists, and sorta had to leave immediately after the award was given.
- m4. f0x
"Don't let your schooling interfere with your education." -Mark Twain
If I put a print of a Van Gogh on my wall, I'll say the original is art, but the reproduction is just an image of art. The idea behind this being that the current version was created by an automated process, but the seed for that process (the Van Gogh) involved skill, creativity and innovation in its creation. By the same token, the TypoGenerator cannot make art, but it may be able to create images of art. In this case, the seed would be the source code of the site. Though we could squabble over the definition of art, it isn't hard to argue that the original code is art. The output when you view the site, though, is (just) a non-unique representation of art.
When an artist drops a gallon of paint in front of a fan, which then blows little blotches all over a huge canvass, is that any different from what you just did with your computer?
'The rule of thumb that I've learned to use as a guide in this question is: "If you need to ask, then the answer is no."'
Which would imply most modern art isn't art, since so many people feel compelled to ask (FWIW, I would agree, but that's a matter of taste). However, this definition, like all simplistic definitions of complex concepts, fails to take into account the evolving nature of art. All art, whether it's Dada's found objects, cubism's plane bending, surrealism's melting clocks, the classical nude or even the Renaissance discovery of perspective, was questioned in its day. So by your definition, nothing created as art has ever really been art until well after the death of the artist when it has become accepted enough for people to stop asking; if all artists restricted themselves to what the majority finds acceptable, we'd still be at the cave-painting stage. I would suggest a more accurate guide to the question "is it art?" would be "If you need to ask nothing, then the answer is no. It's just a pretty picture, which is craft. Art should inspire deeper questioning; if it doesn't (regardless of the age or style of the work), then for you it isn't art".
'...just as calling a chair 'a table' does not make it a table.'
But USING a chair as a table makes it functionally a table for as long as it's being used that way, even if it's still called a chair. Does using a urinal as art make it art, if only until someone takes the piss?
Really, this isn't a new debate. I remember back in high school being handed a directive drom the New South Wales Department of Education telling me a computer was not a musical instrument (never mind that one of my schoolmates left a year earlier to work at Fairlight); this prevented me from writing a piece for the C64 as my final work (scoff if you like, this was high tech for the 80's...).
The problem: introducing a computer meant a different process, and changing the process somehow invalidated the result; this is a problem I see everywhere. A computer is a tool, like a violin, a paintbrush, or a hammer and chisel; works created with a computer (with all the mathematics that implies) shouldn't be judged solely on the fact that they were computer-generated, any more than other works should be judged by whether they were done in oil paint, stone or macaroni. It's the results that count.
Is the Mandelbrot set art? I would argue it is, despite the fact that it can only be generated on a computer, because it reaches everyone on some level. But "real art" should have a message: what is it saying? In the most literal sense, it is saying "x=y-1" (OK, I can't remember the formula). Less literally, it could say many things: "simplicity can only exist for an instant, time adds complexity", for example; I can't think of a way of representing that in watercolours that would be better than an animated Mandelbrot set.
Should the fact that something is derived from a mathematical formula, rather than by direct human guidance, prevent us from using our human abillities to see other meaning? I'd say no, but only because I don't underestimate other people's imaginations.
Art is something palpable designed to elicit an emotional response. It could be a sculpture, a picture, a song, a photograph, or of any other medium. If what the computer generates elicits such a response, then it is Art, with a capital A. Doesn't matter how much of what it generated was done randomly or at the direction of a person, so long as it can bring forth a specific response.
It's fairly easy to elicit a response of the form "that looks cool." I'd have to give those forms of art a barely passing grade. Eliciting more human emotions, such as love and fear, is more difficult. I predict we'll see computer generated art of increasing subtlety in the future.
Otherwise anything and everything would be art, which would require another word for clever renderings that appeal to the human beast.
kitsch
:)
Direct hit. Salute, Sir
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
... said Marshall McLuhan.
54 years ago Alan Turing postulated that if a judge was unable to differentiate between conversational responses given to him by a human and those by a computer program, then that computer program had mastered human-like linguistic skills. This program, of course, will have been assembled by humans, but will provide answers to human-provided input without the supervised direction of another human.
This article suggests that the images generated by TypoGenerator were only art because the humans who had created the program had told it to behave that way, not because the program itself was capable of artistic talent. Surely, the simple concept that the program generated aesthetically-pleasing images, given input by a human being, without the supervised direction of another human means that it has, in fact, passed an "artistic Turing test" and can be classed as an artist in its own right.
There's a very easy way to answer this question:
Someone claims X is art.
If X pisses someone off, then X is probably art.
If X pisses someone off so much that they want to ban it, then X is definitely art.
If X doesn't piss anyone off, it probably is not art.
Ok, so technically that's more fuzzy than easy, but you get the idea.
[o]_O
check it out & u will get all the answers...
the 1337 speak generator is art at it's finest
"Photography captures the art in nature - it doesn't create it."
Well spoken. If I could be arsed creating an account and building some karma, I'd be modding you up rather than writing a stupid comment like this.
I would describe many if not most screen-saver applications as software art.
Also...
http://www.verostko.com/epigenet.html
http://www.runme.org/
And people can use logs of turd to make art and beat off onto glass plates and drop some blood on there before squeezing it all togeter and have it called art...then your answer is Yes.
It should not matter what tools and medium is used and has not before...why the fuck all this silly mysticism whenever a computer is involved? They are just more sophisticated tools, nothing more but still just tools.
I agree absolutely. I think almost everybody here is confusing the synthetizer with the musician. art should have form and content, the program provides the form, while the content is in the code, that's where the intention of the artist (programmer) is. think about sculpture. sculpture has the unique attribute of changing its apparent form (output) depending on the point of view (input), so, can you say that a sculpture is not art when its seen from behind? no. well the programmer found a way to make his sculpture (typogenerator) generate endless forms (images) depending on the input of the viewer. in this case the work of art is not what the program does, but the program itself. the artist is not the computer, but the programmer.
Moo!
that films/music are computer generated art in thier current form. certainly something like the Final Fantasy film or Toy story would be classed as art. Therefore i do not believe it is the tools that are used that defines art but the creativity that goes into creating a work.
It seems stupid that something that is created with a paintbrush is art, something at is created with a chisel can be art, even something that is created with a _chainsaw_ is art (in rare occasions) but something that is created with a computer isn't.
of course a chainsaw can be used for cutting trees and a comp can be used for doing spreadsheets and neither is art.
It doesn't even look like art. It isn't even cool like some screen savers (triagle). It's not interesting in the slightest.
But leaving aside poor taste, all it does is show how the "Art" establishment has affected many people to the point that they are unable to recognise art, distinguish art from non-art, or decide whether or art is good or bad; and fail to trust their own judgement.
Please read "For a Breath I Tarry" by Roger Zelazny. It gives a definitive test for determining what is art, and to what extent computers can create it.
And is it the user or the coder that takes the kudos (or rap) for the work? Or the viewer, maybe? It seems obvious that it is the third mind (a synthesis of the first two). It has been postulated that the most consistent application of computer-generated art is the novel Rape vs. Murder http://www.pinkstainless.net/simon
Which is the greater evil: ignorance or apathy? I dont know and I dont care.
I don't have the education to be able to intelligently discuss what is art and what is not. But would it be possible for a computer to create art ? Sure. Just like a paint brush can paint beautiful scenes guided by an artists hand a computer can follow it's instructions given by coders' hands. The root of the creative effort comes from humans, so I think it is possible it is art. I consider the how irrelevant.
With the onset of 'abstract expressionism' (sneer) the last vestiges of the Modernism were thrown away and is was decided anything can be art if someone says it is, which brings us to the current era where a mess is sold for thousands and every artist is paranoid about being unoriginal, uninspired, a hack, boring, unknown, etc to the point where nothing is created and this shit prevails. alas.
Finally there is the obvious two sides of the fence: those who make art and those who look at it. The artist is always aware of their own intentions, but never quite sure of their purpose, except to 'express themselves' - which is nonsense and has bred several generations of the simpleton artist producing garbage and blank canvases. Those who look at it are an entire global audience eating that same shit defecated by artists, licking their lips and saying "this shit tastes like honey".
Im very bitter, an of course I'm generalizing, there are some supremely good artists out there, but the majority (99%) are awful, awful, hacks. Art these days, art in the old fashioned scope of 'intent, purpose and skill' is best found in graphic designers who Ive noticed have a fuller grasp of the aesthetic than any visual artist leaving uni ever will.
"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." -- Salvador Dali
I think almost everybody here is confusing the synthetizer with the musician.
A nice analogy.
Isao Tomita credited his bevy of synthesizers under the name "The Plasma Symphony Orchestra", but it was clearly tongue-in-cheek.
P.S. The artrenewal.org site also has a huge free gallery with high-res scans of thousands of great paintings. Including tasty nudes by Bouguereau for those so inclined.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.