Is Computer-Created Art, Art? 441
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?"
AARON (Score:5, Interesting)
I think a better metaphor would be... (Score:3, Interesting)
...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?
Is human-created "art" art? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Don't see why not (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, it's more of a question of whether or not it's good art, than art.
But is it art? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Computer-generated Chopin (Score:4, Interesting)
My art as an example (Score:3, Interesting)
The donkey and the paintbrush.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
It depends (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
aimLOOK AT MY ART (Score:2, Interesting)
Shocked and appalled (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The Fractal Art Manifesto (Score:4, Interesting)
Marcel
Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
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-
Re:STOP!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
But tcdk, you should take into account that *sounding* clever goes a long way. A rose by any other name would still smell the same, but nobody will buy roses from you if you call them hoarts.
Remember, words have power.
Re:The XXth century showed us .... (Score:2, Interesting)
Almost anything can be art.
Art is not in the mechanics of making the work. Art is not the camera, the paint brush, the canvas, the paper, the instrument. Art is not the tools, the raw materials, or the technique.
Art is the thoughts, emotions, and ideas that a work engenders. It's the vision and execution of the artist, how well they are able to communicate their vision to you, and the degree that they are able to allow you to share and participate in that vision.
A painting is not art. A painting is pigment, in a carrier base, smeared onto a surface. Art is how you are cunningly roped into having an emotional or intellectual response to those smears. A photograph isn't art. Photographic art is how the photographer manipulates his or her tools, the environment, and light in order to render their subject in a manner that evokes a connection with the viewer.
Say I took a group of 200 random images from a traffic camera (or cameras), and laid them all out in a large-format print. Among the bog-standard frames, I blend in a few images of serious collisions and pedestrian accidents. One casual observer might remark, "That's not art - it's just frames from a traffic camera." Another might notice the accident frames and say, "That's horrible - that's not artistic." A third may look at the same work and share my intent and vision - to show that tragedy mostly just occurs in boring, mundane, day-to-day life, barely noticeable.
So, I propose that the criteria for determining "art" is: Does the work have the potential to invoke a deeper appreciation than mere superficial stimulus? By saying "potential," we can try to limit the suggestive assessment of the success of the artist in doing so.
Re:AARON (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh, for heaven's sake (Score:3, Interesting)
So if you have an artefact (e.g. a photograph) in your hand, how do tell whether it's 'art' or the output of a random process? To be concrete about this, seeing you're a photographer, suppose I took a camera, linked its shutter release to an atom of something with a half-life of a week or two so that when the atom decayed the shutter was released, and strapped the camera to the back of a blind man who was instructed to walk wherever he liked. At the end of the process there would be a picture. That is, I'm sure you'd say, not art.
Now, suppose some self important pompous artist took a camera and carefully and pompously framed a particular image, capturing a particular instant in time. That is, I'm sure you'd say, art. Even if the 'artist' happened to be standing beside the blind man at the same time.
Now supposing the two photographs were dropped on the dark room floor, and when you picked them up you could not remember which was which. What intrinsic property does a work of art have which allows it to be distinguished from non-art? If there is no such property, then surely there can be no such thing as art, because it cannot be discriminated; if the property is in the eye of the beholder, then surely the product of the random process is just as much 'art' as the product of the artist.
Oh, and shouting and assertion does not make your point of view true. If you have an argument to advance, by all means advance it...
hackers & painters (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [decompiler.us].
Re:Oh, for heaven's sake (Score:2, Interesting)
I call BS. While there may be some people working in fractals who do the digital equivalent of "walking around, randomly photographing...", there are plenty of people producing beautiful images by hand selecting which equation, what coloring method, which colors, and, in more complicated instances, what layering techniques to use. In particular, check out the works of Sylvie Gallet, Damien Jones, and Kerry Mitchell (google on each name and take first link). Sure, they all use computers to produce the art, and each uses fractals as their medium, but each produces works of striking beauty and each has a style that is distinct to themselves.
If Ansel Adams can walk around in the wilderness and come upon a random scene of a small southwestern town with the sunset just at the exact right angle to illuminate the town and the rising moon in the background (description here [coolantarctica.com]), then it is, in fact, possible for people to take pictures of nearly random elements of our environment and have the output be art. There are many, many examples of so-called random photographs that are considered art. I can't thik of the name offhand, but there's a guy in New York who takes amazing portraits of people on the street by walking around with a camera, jumping in front of someone, and taking a flash photo of their face. Granted, I don't like everything he does, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't produce art, just art I don't like.
If the photograph, then, is art, then what sets the digital equivalent apart? The fact that there is no physical document? The fact that I didn't have to get my hands covered in developing fluid or paint all over my shirt? The simple fact is that mankind has been using new technologies and new techniques to make art ever since the first caveman picked up a piece of charcol and drew a buffalo on a cave wall. The camera that you hold to be such a lofty means of creating art was itself the subject of a similar discussion in the art community when it was first introduced, yet today, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who'd disagree with the statement that you can make art with a camera.
In the end, I look at these "artists" turning their nose up at new methods as being elitist snobs who are unable or unwilling to recognize that art is not static, there is no standard definition, and there is no inherent quality that one can point to that seperates art from crap.
Interactive Vs Uninteractive art? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [blender3d.org]. 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.
Is it art? Who cares. Is it copyrightable? Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a fuller discussion of the theory here [jerf.org], 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 [random-art.org] 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 [jerf.org] on this issue.)
Another website: Comlexification (Score:2, Interesting)
What is beauty? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:AARON (Score:3, Interesting)
Just my two cents:
There's also:
(webGobbler is my own creation - Comments are welcome...)
Still, I would not pretend this is art.