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Computers & art PDF

160 Pages·2008·2.42 MB·English
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t r a & s g rn i l a ee m t r ta u t s u y b d e pt i d e mn o i t i d e d on o c e s c Computers & Art Second Edition edited by Stuart Mealing intellect Bristol, UK Portland, OR, USA Second edition published in Great Britain in 2002 by Intellect, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK Second edition published in USA in 2002 by Intellect, ISBS, 5824 N,E.Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon, 97213-3644, USA First edition published 1n 1997 Copyright ©2002 Intellect Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission, Consulting Editor: Masoud Yazdani Copy Editors: Holly Spradling and Wendi Momen Cover & book design: Toucan Set in Quadraat A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Electronic ISBN 1-84150-874-8 / ISBN 1-84150-062-3 Printed & bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press, Wiltshire Contents 5 Introduction 7 Stuart Mealing On drawing a circle 17 George Whale Why use computers to make drawings? 33 Ed Burton Representing representation: artificial intelligence and drawing 51 John Lansdown Some trends in computer graphic art 59 Jim Noble Fatal attraction: print meets computer 73 Jeremy Diggle Ayear and a day on the road to Omniana 81 Martin Rieser The art of interactivity: interactive installation from gallery to street 97 Paul Brown Networks and artworks: the failure of the user-friendly interface nts 109 Joanna Buick nte Virtual reality and art o C 4 119 Richard Wright n ditio Visual technology and the poetics of knowledge E d n Seco& Art 127 BPorisatn-m Roedffeinm-S amrtit, hor: Virtual reality as Trojan donkey, ers or: Horsetail tartan literature groin art ut p m o C 143 Mike King Artificial consciousness – artificial art Stuart Mealing Introduction There is an undeniable frisson about juxtaposing the words ‘art’ and ‘computers’ since they stand at the gateways of seemingly opposite worlds, guardians of opposite values and standards. Their juxtaposition calls into dispute embedded notions about art, about creativity, about consciousness and thus about the human condition. For over 30 years I have been either involved with art and excited by computers or involved with computers and excited by art. I should provide a prime audience for computer art, yet have often been left curiously cold by the products of the two disciplines coming together. I would not want to compile a book documenting computer art. ‘Computers and art’, however, is an altogether more expansive subject which can look at the practice and potential of computers as tools, enablers, creators and as sources of inspiration in the field of the visual arts. The discipline is a new one; a medium perhaps still waiting for its time. As with the early years of photography, it once aped more established media and sought comfort from its own technology, but its very existence has also provoked some of the most stimulating questions of our time. Paul Davies, in the Sunday Times, quoted the scholar George Steiner on opening the Edinburgh Arts Festival, as remarking that science has now seized the high ground of human intellectual endeavour, leaving the arts floundering and looking irrelevantly self-indulgent – a tacit acknowledgement that scientists are now tackling many of the age-old questions of existence, topics that were formerly the exclusive preserve of religion and literature. If true, it might be that in those areas of the arts which embrace and overlap the sciences there is a heightened potential for such ground to be reclaimed. It would be strange to criticise a painting because you could see that it had been made with a brush and paint, yet computer-generated images are often criticised for being “too computery” or because “you can tell they’ve been done by a computers”. This implies either that there is merit in concealing the origin of the image – that the computer is not a worthy tool for the creation of images – or that the computer generates a particular (implicitly unsatisfactory) type of image. Perceived manifestations of computer generated imagery include – a lack of evidence of hand skills, absolute precision, a clear mathematical basis for the composition, palette limitations of tone or hue, a geometrical quality of line, a regularity of shapes and objects, limitations of an output device (e.g. scale, resolution), pixellation, and a clinical ‘cleanness’ of image. Perhaps there is a tendency to criticise a medium for being recognisable when it is imitating something more usually (or better?) created in another medium. The artifice (or fraud) has been exposed. “You can tell it’s a photograph” might be a legitimate criticism of an image which purports to be a painting but not of a piece of reportage, when the opposite criticism would be valid. It is true that the art-generating computer has sometimes been used to do things which it is not good at or for which it lacks subtlety. Such attempts imply that global aesthetic judgements should be suspended in favour of local judgement of an immature art form. This is reminiscent of interpreting the performance of a two-year-old child playing Chopsticks on the piano as charming and talented whilst recognising that an adult duplicating the performance would merely prove embarrassing. Digital art must, of course, come to stand and be judged without concession alongside other art if it is to be n uctio taken seriously and after a few false starts it is now coming to do so. d ntro Questions queue up to launch themselves at digital art and the most challenging are I philosophical. Will the medium develop its own aesthetic? If a computer was to 6 generate images at random and was able to evaluate its output in order to produce better dition work, what would be its criteria for judgement? Since an expert system would only E reflect existing human values, what rules would allow a computer to bootstrap its way d n SecoArt taoewstahredtsic bmuailkdei nifg i tsit ps roodwunc tv iasl tuoe b sey vsiteewme?d bWy hhuamt asenns?s e A wndo umlda nay mmoarceh binees’isd eisn.t ernal & ers Within these chapters a number of viewpoints are expressed and perspectives put illustrated in a range of styles. There has been a conscious editorial decision not to try to m o unify the styles in which the chapters are written since each proves expressive of the C direction from which its author comes. Between them, however, the contributions are designed to cover a broad range of issues within the field of computer art, extended in this second edition by additional chapters. Hopefully this discursive triangulation will help to pinpoint a worthwhile subject area. Contributors to the book are variously artists, scientists, critics, philosophers, educators or often several of those things. They come to the subject from a wide and often mixed range of backgrounds and their combined essays raise questions relevant to practitioners in as many different disciplines. In some cases those questions are answered but their having been posed is more useful to the debate than their resolution. My own interests currently come together in a research project connecting computers and life drawing. For some the meeting ground between computers and art is found in philosophical discourse. For others this same wedding is consumated in purely artistic output. Each reader will bring a unique personal perspective to the book and will hopefully be stimulated to share the excitement, concern and passion expressed within these pages. Stuart Mealingis variously a writer, researcher, lecturer and consultant in visual applications of computing. Trained initially as a fine artist in the late 60s he exhibited widely and taught in art colleges for many years whilst maintaining a practical interest in the development of computing. Many years later he took a post-graduate degree in Computing in Design and is currently a Reader in Computers and Drawing at the University of Plymouth in Exeter and the research coordinator for Art & Design. He was a founder member of their Centre for Visual Computing, a founding editor of Digital Creativityand has also been an Honorary Research Fellow in Computer Science at Exeter University. His research interests centre on computers, drawing, creativity and artificial intelligence (although an intermittent project on visual language keeps resurfacing). His publications include five books and his papers, articles and reviews have appeared in a range of journals. Stuart Mealing On drawing a circle Emotions generated in the viewer by objective drawings which are made using traditional media are different from those elicited by digitally originated marks presented on a computer screen. This chapter explores the dichotomy of production and interpretation of the two forms of mark-making and considers the possibility that they may lead to different understandings of the world. Prologue 2 The story is told by Vasari of Pope Benedict IX sending a messenger to a number of artists with a view to commissioning one of them. In Florence he met with Giotto and requested of him a drawing to take to His Holiness. The painter took a brush, “then, resting his elbow on his side, with one turn of his hand he drew a circle so perfect and exact that it was a marvel to behold.” The courtier thought he could not be serious to offer so little but took the drawing to the Pope who “instantly perceived that Giotto ng surpassed all other painters of his time.” ali Me 2 2 2 art The implicit equation of a circle (centred on j) is: (x-xj) + (y-yj) - r = 0. u Ste On drawing a circle a circl How do you, I or Giotto draw a circle? How its circularity stored in the mind – by its g appearance, by its formula, by the algorithm used to construct it? A circle could be n wi thought of either statically or dynamically, as a concatenation of all positions in one a dr n plane which are the same distance from a single point or as an arc sweeping before O your eyes. In the first incarnation it is matched by a mathematical template, in the 8 second by a turn of the wrist. n ditio When fingers and wrist combine to take a line on a slow, looping journey there is E nd constant feedback from eye to hand, correcting incrementally against a mental SecoArt mmoudscelle. sO, tnh aat rdarpivides c tihrecu amctsiocnri.p Otifo cno uitr ssee einm tsh eto c obnet ehxatb oitf, o bbujercntti vien tdor atwhein nge trhvee sm aanrdk & ers not only has its own identity but also stands for something in the outside world. The put significance is that a circle is more than its shape, it embodies a concept. It hints of m Co containment, harbours dreams of perfection, reminds of heads, suns and apples. This reference to the world outside the drawing, whether tacit or explicit, ties the experience of the observer to that of the mark’s creator and the mark may need to carry evidence of humanity to establish the link convincingly. 3 Making marks, externalising and looking are vital parts of an artist’s process . They are clearly linked to one another but also create a conduit through which ideas flow back and forth between artist, subject and image. It is through the process of making and refining marks to stand for the subject that the artist comes to a better understanding of the subject – its form, its weight, its articulation, its occupation of space, its place in the world, its circularity. Poles apart As I have commented in the introduction to this book, there is an undeniable frisson about juxtaposing the words ‘art’ and ‘computer’ since they stand at the gateways of seemingly opposite worlds, guardians of opposite values and standards. Their juxtaposition calls into dispute embedded notions about art, about creativity, about consciousness and thus about the human condition. Their union provokes questions about new aesthetics, new directions and new destinations. Within the domain of art the immediacy and directness of objective drawing arguably renders it the subset of the discipline which has the narrowest gap between encounter and corresponding mark; the medium where artist, subject and image are closest. As such a knowing distinction between the stamp of man or machine could play an 9 overbearing role in emotional response to an image. Negroponte comments that ‘computers and art can bring out the worst in each other when they first meet. One reason is that the signature of the machine can be too strong.’ Neither is idiosyncrasy normally an intended feature of machines. Local context can also be an issue, both in production and viewing, which separates traditional media from digital. The archetypal life drawing studio, stained by generations of use and redolent both of its own history and that of its subject, provides a very different working environment from that surrounding the average O computer workstation. Similarly, viewing an image on the wall of an art gallery n d provides a very different physical and cultural experience to that of staring at a raw in computer screen, even when the computer itself is displayed in a gallery. g a Dislocations circle Traditional coordinations are revised when drawing with a computer. Whilst the Stu a hand typically toils in a horizontal plane, the results of its efforts are output to a rt M normally vertical screen and with a delay lasting from imperceptible to worrying ealin g according to the type of mark being made and the speed of the system. 9 The tools available in a computer paint system largely imitate those available for C o traditional mark-making. The value of this imitation is the apparent familiarity the m p u user has with the new tools – there seems little to learn. The problem with this te imitation is the apparent familiarity the user has with the new tools – the rs & A fruelnadtiaomnsehnitpasl dfoifrf etrheen caersti sat reb eotwveerelno otkoeodl . aTnhde mcaormk,p uretelart iopnrosvhiidpess wah incehw m soedt ifoyf, rt Secon d distort or destroy much of the feedback which drives traditional drawing. E d The drawing tool is usually replaced in the current digital world with a universal ition proxy that stands for all available tools. Its feel does not change whether simulating the grate of a charcoal stick or the smooth slide of a sable brush nor whether it is making light, fine scratches or broad, wet sweeps. If it comes in the awkward form of a mouse the required grip is more like that on a bar of soap though a stylus is pencil- like and permits fingertip control reminiscent of ‘real’ media. Tool pressure can be set to modify variables such as size and opacity of marks but such relationships are pre-set rather than modified whilst in use. There is, however, none of the tactile feedback, none of the physicality of pen, chalk and paper. ‘We draw a picture without 1 making a mark, wield brushes that have no bristles, mix paints that do not pour’. A new breed of haptic devices is slowly emerging which offers sensory feedback from the virtual texture of a surface and force-feedback from the virtual forces an object might embody but these are currently uncommon. Their functionality tends also to be limited and application specific. The scale of marks is physically limited by the size of the graphics tablet (or mouse mat) available and may be psychologically inhibited by the cramped space often allocated to computer workstations. There is also the potential for the mapping of hand movement to screen mark being other than 1:1; a small hand movement can be scaled up to produce a larger mark for example, or the screen image may be enlarged so that the opposite is true. More disconcerting is that the relationship between tool and screen coordinates can be either absolute or relative, the former matching the real world but a mouse typically abandoning an absolute relationship when it is out of

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.