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Neural Nets Make Art While High
brilanon writes "Telepathic-critterdrug is a controversial fork of the open source artificial-life sim Critterding, a physics sandbox where blocky creatures evolve neural nets in a survival contest. What we've done is to give these animals an extra retina which is shared with the whole population. It's extended through time like a movie and they can write to it for communication or pleasure. Since this introduces the possibility of the creation of art, we decided to give them a selection of narcotics, stimulants and psychedelics. This is not in Critterding. The end result is a high-color cellular automaton running on a substrate that thinks and evolves, and may actually produce hallucinations in the user."
What controversy? All I see is someone promoting their own project on /.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
If ever there was a need for a "wtf" tag...
Palm trees and 8
in order to understand what the hell this is about?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Needs more acid.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
I just looked at the link and I see that quite a few of them have starved.
So this mimics real life starving artists who (although they are starving) can still afford to get high.
The art will be worth more once the PC is off.
Look, I'm all for making robots and AIs do work, but outsourcing our drug use (and sex, apparently) is just going too far! Leave at least something for us puny humans to enjoy!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
This is either an incredibly cool experiment or an unparalleled exercise in highly-refined, weapons-grade bullshit.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Sounds like a mind.forth troll by a different name. Show how this work realistically explains or models anything about biological mental processes or furthers AI or neural net research. Narcotics, stimulants, and psychedelics are complex chemical interactions in brain, not superficial rainbow colors on a grid.
Submit this work for peer review and rightly be humbled by the withering reviews.
The only mental stuff going on with this project is the mental masturbation.
Have you ever painted a picture with your menstrual blood? You should try it.
:)
It fades to a silvery-crimson sheen, like metallic paint does, due to the iron content of the blood. I still get all misty-eyed when I think about her giving me that painting. I framed it and put it on my desk at work. They thought I was a weirdo. Fuck them. She even kept my semen in a test tube, stored in her freezer next to the Hot Pockets.
Giving a menstrual blood painting is the ultimate expression of love -- short of cannibalism, at least
That painting is a biohazard and regulated medical waste if disposed. However, had she used a feminine pad instead of paper OSHA has ruled in that case menses on a feminine hygiene product is not a regulated medical waste.
once a cellular automaton cuts off its ear.
Ok, I'm not usually one to get involved in a discussion such as this (I'm not an artist, have barely a passing interest in it to be honest), but perhaps that gives me a unique perspective that both you and the poster that started this little squabble started. If I may break this down, the original poster seems to have said (in a crude and perhaps insulting fashion) that they don't care for a particular artist. You're response appears to be that they don't like that artist because they don't understand the art itself. Ok, maybe that's a valid point. However, I would postulate that one does not need to 'get' art to enjoy it, and it may be possible that one can 'get' art and still not like it. The only things I have to go on are personal examples of my (limited) exposure to art. Take the Blue Man group. I have no idea what there is to 'get' in their performances. I don't understand them. However, I do enjoy their particular spin on performance art (I think it looks cool, it's done well, and although I haven't in the past gone out of the way to find any of their work, I've also never changed the station if I see them on. On the flip side, during an art class I took at ITT (of all places), one particular piece I saw was a cup, saucer and spoon covered with fur (literally the artist took a cup, a saucer and a spoon and affixed fur to it), I get it (well it was explained to me), it's purpose was to surprise the viewer and get them to think about what that would feel like if one were to use those dishes. I don't like it (as in it has no aesthetic qualities that appeal to me). No amount of exposure to that particular work of art (or any others) will get me to change my mind (frankly I think it was just crap).
But I suppose that none of this matters, because art is a subjective thing. Some people will not like some things, it doesn't mean they don't understand the it. The artist may sit down and explain it to the person, and they still might say "so what it's crap in my eyes". And of course that whole "in my eyes" is really all that matters to them, just as to the artist, the creation is what matters, because to them it is not crap, but a heartfelt pouring out of their being into that work, to express to others how they see whatever it is that they are expressing.
I will however, state that if the original poster was dogging Pollock and saying that they made no contribution to the world, yeah that's kinda nasty, after all, even though I don't get art (for the most part) due to my lack of exposure, all artists contribute to the world in some manner, usually positive, as artists make cool stuff (to paraphrase a bumper sticker I once saw) and they (if nothing else) make the world a richer and more interesting (sometimes more beautiful) place to live.
I got nuthin
"telepathic-critterdrug isn't available yet for Windows. I'm sorry"
The one thing I hate about Windows is the lack of compatibility with neural nets
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
Whenever I hear people arguing over art (and it is usually as you say in your initial summary, that one will say they don't care for an artist's work and the other insists that the first is merely too ignorant to truly understand the art) it reminds me of the scene in Zoolander where the male models are all doing the rounds telling each other, "no, I think YOU'RE missing the point". There's so much effort put into trying not to be the crass, uncultured lout who doesn't understand 'the vision' that no-one actually realises that there IS no 'vision' and it's all just a big glob of pretentious wank.
As for the point about Pollock's later paintings having higher fractal dimensions, that's a natural consequence of random splotches of colour as you add more splotches and more detail, regardless of the actual artistic merit. You might as well say that maps of Britain have become more and more aesthetically pleasing as mapmakers made more precise maps and the coastline's fractal dimension increased.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.