Computers & art

160 Pages·2008·2.42 MB·English

by  Stuart Mealing

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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
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119 Richard Wright
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ditio Visual technology and the poetics of knowledge
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Seco& Art 127 BPorisatn-m Roedffeinm-S amrtit, hor: Virtual reality as Trojan donkey,
ers or: Horsetail tartan literature groin art
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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
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uctio taken seriously and after a few false starts it is now coming to do so.
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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
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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
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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
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o unify the styles in which the chapters are written since each proves expressive of the
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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.”
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Me 2 2 2
art The implicit equation of a circle (centred on j) is: (x-xj) + (y-yj) - r = 0.
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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
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wi thought of either statically or dynamically, as a concatenation of all positions in one
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n plane which are the same distance from a single point or as an arc sweeping before
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your eyes. In the first incarnation it is matched by a mathematical template, in the
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second by a turn of the wrist.
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ditio When fingers and wrist combine to take a line on a slow, looping journey there is
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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according to the type of mark being made and the speed of the system.
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The tools available in a computer paint system largely imitate those available for
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traditional mark-making. The value of this imitation is the apparent familiarity the m
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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 &
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distort or destroy much of the feedback which drives traditional drawing. E
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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
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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